student “reports from the field” of COVID-19’s early months in the US.
My spring 2020 course HST 380: Digital Methods for Historical Projects shifted from our intended goal of creating oral histories, audio podcasts, and multimedia webpages about the history of SUNY Brockport itself to a digital pop-up exhibition that presents “reports from the field” about life during the early months of the COVID-19 crisis.
Each student created a narrative for the exhibition, based on at least one artifact. That one object could be a photograph, video, music, something from the news, any kind of detail that felt meaningful.
Here are the results: a strikingly prescient early observation of police brutality in New York City; an honest accounting of what it was like to search for one’s first post-college job during a pandemic; ruminations on finding ways of connecting during a time of social distancing, quarantine, and lockdown; a harrowing account of surviving COVID-19 itself; and more.