Of Wartime, Lifeboats, and Preserving Different Perspectives:

An Archivist-Historian Reflects on History and Community in Pandemic Times

Sarah Glassford

        When Samantha Cutrara invited me to be a part of her Pandemic Pedagogy video series, like a number of her other interview partners I was initially hesitant. It has been a few years now since I left the teaching profession, so I was unsure whether I had much to offer her audience. She insisted that, for her, teaching history was about mobilizing the past, and that was undoubtedly part of my work as an archivist working in an academic library.  That was enough to convince me, but it might be helpful to readers if I start by introducing myself, to explain the context for these reflections.

At this point in my career I wear two complementary but distinct professional hats. I started out as a social historian: I did my Ph.D. in History at York University and went on to be a History professor for about a decade, teaching at four different Canadian universities. I loved that phase of my career path but in time I wanted greater stability than itinerant short-term teaching contracts could provide. I therefore went back to school and earned a Master’s degree in Library and Information Science from Western University. That allowed me to transition to a new career as an archivist, and in that capacity I started out by working for the Canadian Red Cross and then for the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick. Currently, I’m the head of the Archives and Special Collections unit in Leddy Library at the University Windsor (Hat #1). I am also still actively researching and publishing as a Canadian historian (Hat #2).

The First Question: Have you thought of history any differently during or after this pandemic moment? 

This question sent my mind off in about half a dozen directions, but my initial barely-even-had-to-think-about-it response is a result of perfect timing. Four years of editorial work with historian Amy Shaw from the University of Lethbridge happened to culminate in the publication of our book during the early weeks of Canada’s COVID-19 shutdown. The book, called Making the Best of It: Women and Girls of Canada and Newfoundland during the Second World War (UBC Press, 2020), showed up on my doorstep about two or three weeks into my pandemic isolation. I was very excited to see it in print it, of course — not least because it felt like a reconnection to the regular world. But then it took on an additional significance and a surprising relevance to my own life as I reacquainted myself with the content and talked about it with Amy.

We were both struck by how many interesting connections existed between the overarching themes that run through our book about women’s experiences in the Second World War and what we’ve been experiencing during the pandemic. The two most notable similarities are (1) the importance of community in shaping our experiences of massive, potentially life-altering events, and (2) the fact that we can be in the middle of a stressful, difficult event and yet have very positive experiences as a result. It’s strange, but something like wartime or a pandemic can be both a terrible time and a special time all at once. We tend (especially in this age of soundbites and Tweets) to want to weigh the evidence and then reduce our own and others’ experiences to a simple “good” or “bad” assessment. But being swept up into major world events is just as likely to produce an ambivalent “yes-and-no,” “good-and-bad” response in people. The human mind is complex, and it is entirely possible for one person to hold contradictory views about the same experience.

This is one of the things that Amy and I spend some time grappling with in the introduction and conclusion to our book, because it is challenging to reconcile what scholars have uncovered about the war with the contrasting popular memory of those years. Scholars have tended to take a negative view, arguing that the Second World War did not, in the long term, liberate women in any significant way from oppressive social expectations and structural inequities. And not only were many of the gains that were made in wartime rolled back as soon as the men came home from the war, but previously existing forms of prejudice and oppression against some groups of Canadians (regardless of gender) were maintained or, in some cases, exacerbated, during the war. In contrast, Canadian popular memory of women during the war years revolves around empowering iconography such as Rosie the Riveter flexing her bicep under the statement “We Can Do It!” Rosie’s famous image seems to encapsulate the sense of new opportunities, community, fun, and romance that are prominent themes in how we remember the war years. So we have the positive, popular memory that’s frequently promulgated in TV series, movies, and books, and then on the other hand what scholars have found – and the two don’t often talk to each other.

As we went through the process of editing this book, reading the contributors’ essays and immersing ourselves in memoirs and diaries from the time, Amy and I found that women of the Second World War era were talking about, and experiencing, both of those perspectives. They were aware that, from a gender relations standpoint, perfect equality did not magically descend upon society, but they often recognized meaningful changes in their own lives. Sometimes they were having a great time and sometimes they were having a terrible time. It really depended on the communities that they belonged to – for example, their religious affiliation or what profession they were in, their linguistic, ethnic, or racial background, and whether they knew someone who was overseas or not. All of those groups – some overlapping and some separate — helped determine women’s resiliency: in other words, whether the war years crushed them completely, were the greatest time in their lives, or (more likely) somewhere in between.

The contradictions and messiness of women’s wartime experiences, and the importance of community in all of it, have really been brought home for me by experiencing this coronavirus pandemic. I think especially so because I spent the initial “shutdown” portion of it alone in my home. When we were urged to limit our in-person contact with others as much as possible, I had to make an effort to connect with my social communities through various forms of telecommunication. Sometimes it was wearying, but it was also a really wonderful experience to be in regular contact again with people from the different places that I’ve lived, and to connect with various groups I’ve been a part of. Normally we’re all caught up in our everyday lives, or busy with activities, but for a few months everyone I knew was reaching out and trying to connect. Emotionally speaking, I benefitted from that in a big way. So working remotely and staying at home as much as possible during the early stage of the pandemic was trying in lots of ways, but it was also unexpectedly great. I feel like I understand the contradictions we identified in the Second World War so much better, now.

Samantha observed at this point in our video conversation that as teachers and mobilizers of history, the pandemic gives us an opportunity to recognize these kinds of contradictions in ourselves and then to translate that into how we teach and learn history. If we can feel anxiety and hope or loneliness and connectedness in tandem, we might ask how people in the past have felt similarly contradictory emotions in response to the events they lived through. Can we see those sorts of impulses at work in our historical narratives?

Another train of thought that occurred to me in response to the first question arose from the fact that I spent years studying and teaching the history of medicine, and one popular approach in that field is to focus on epidemics in the past. You can fruitfully spend a lot of time examining the rich histories of cholera, smallpox, syphilis, polio, the Black Plague, or any number of other major epidemic diseases. This is because each outbreak in a particular time and place serves as a microcosm of what was going on in that society: everything from medical knowledge of the time – especially their contemporary theories of the body, and what they did or did not know about germs – to what the socioeconomic hierarchy looked like and what tensions that produced. Time and again throughout history, epidemic disease has revealed (sometimes very quickly) the hidden cracks that exist just beneath the surface of what might otherwise appear to be a smoothly functioning society. The interconnection between health and society – in other words, how historically contingent our responses to health and disease are –becomes readily apparent when you study the history of medicine.

My familiarity with health history has informed my own responses to COVID-19 (guiding me to take it seriously but also not to panic), as well as to provide a rich context in which to interpret the responses of others, from the official work of public health units to protests against mandatory closures and mask-wearing. For instance, I’ve found it deeply disappointing but thoroughly unsurprising to see that a historical pattern of scapegoating – identifying an individual or group to blame – has been at work in this pandemic. Pretty much every single epidemic in history has involved some group being scapegoated; those pre-existing tensions in society rear their heads, and some group of people that is already marginalized, resented, and/or feared bears the brunt of others’ fears and anger. My favourite example of this tendency is syphilis, which, during the sixteenth century, was known as “the French disease,” “the Spanish disease,” “the Italian disease,” “the Polish disease,” or “the German disease” depending on which European country was describing it. Everyone was keen to blame it on someone else.

The first reported outbreaks of COVID-19 came from Wuhan, China, and we can certainly debate whether enough information was shared in a timely way, and what actions were taken as a response, from that situation. But there’s a lot more than these kinds of practical questions at play when we hear American President Donald Trump (quickly parroted by his supporters) calling COVID-19 “the Chinese disease” or “Kung Flu.” The decision to refer to the disease in this way clearly draws upon pre-existing anti-Asian racism and decades of intermittent diplomatic tensions between communist China and the democratic United States – perhaps also American insecurity in the face of China’s ever-growing global influence. Trump’s comments take those simmering tensions and mobilize them as a way to deflect criticism from the American federal government’s own bungled response to the pandemic once it arrived in North America. Whether it’s blatant or subtle, this type of scapegoating fulfills a persistent desire in people throughout history to pin the cause of disease on somebody who is already perceived as (or can easily be painted as) not-one-of-us. If the presence and/or spread of the disease is somebody else’s fault, it makes it seem more manageable and provides a tangible outlet for the anger, fear, and anxiety that we feel in connection with deadly diseases.

Closely tied to this idea that somebody has come into our safe little bubble and endangered us, we often see that scapegoating culminates in violence and oppression against the group blamed for the disease or its spread. So far I’m not aware of that happening on a widescale in Canada, but I have heard in more recent weeks, both here and in other countries, reports of small-scale violence or threatening behaviour in public places over the issue of wearing masks in public. There was an incident in Mississauga where a man who refused to wear a mask in a large supermarket selling primarily Asian foods became violent and ranted about the “Wuhan communist virus” being the fault of Asian people. If enough citizens succumb to this kind of scapegoating logic, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that we could see widespread violence or other forms of oppression – in any region or country. It’s a pattern that has repeated itself throughout history because when we feel threatened and powerless we often lash out at others. We are certainly not immune to this in the twenty-first century.

My third answer to the first question is one that occurred to me around the second or third day that my workplace had shifted to a work-from-home model. Like many people, in those first few days of the shutdown period I was still trying to create a functional workspace in my home, and I was watching a lot of TV news and scanning social media to see how other people I knew were experiencing this. At the end of that particular day I had a minor lightbulb moment. “I bet this is what it was like,” I thought, “when the First or the Second World War had been declared, but nothing had actually happened yet.” My university, library, and archives were still functioning but they had closed the campus and my colleagues and I were all working from home. There was a palpable sense that things were far from normal, and it seemed like absolutely nothing was newsworthy except the pandemic but there wasn’t much to report except everything shutting down. The shutdown was a pre-emptive and pro-active move, so it created a feeling of crisis… but without any actual crisis events to point to yet. (There were, of course, the examples of China, Italy, and Spain to look to, but nothing closer to home.)

It struck me as this weird little moment of unreality – a very pregnant pause as we all waited for what might happen next. That sense of waiting gave me new insight into the early weeks of both world wars – and especially of the First World War in which they had no idea what they were in for, in terms of the scale of devastation to come. I think both then and now, there was a sense of “This could get really bad, but it’s not bad yet. Right now it’s actually kind of fun.” It’s hard to explain to students why citizens in many of the combatant countries threw parades and celebrated when they declared war in August 1914, because it seems so perverse in light of what we know about the truly horrible suffering the First World War produced. But I really felt like I understood it in the early days of the pandemic shutdown here. People were posting on social media about how they were wearing their pajamas while working at home, the panic-buying of toilet paper led to shortages which in turn led to amusing memes, novice bakers blogged about learning to bake bread, and late night TV show hosts filmed stripped-down versions of their shows from their own houses. There was a strangely festive feeling to it – a combination of novelty, nervous energy, and making the best of an unusual situation. At any rate, being in that short-lived moment of waiting for something that hadn’t yet happened provided me with a point of connection to the past that I found really fascinating.

At this point in our video conversation, Samantha observed that while she too felt the novelty of that early waiting period, she also had a strong sense of what she called “responsibility to the dread.” She recalled this playing out in everyday actions like not making eye contact when passing someone during a walk down the street, as a way to demonstrate her understanding that the pandemic was a serious situation. She also connected it to a project undertaken by the Archives of Ontario in which they Tweeted excerpts from a diary of someone who lived through the War of 1812. That was a war, she noted, in which the fighting was far from most people’s homes, creating a similar distance between the contours of daily life and the crisis itself – the latter of which demanded a certain reverence or respect. Negotiating the social part of such situations, she said, was tricky, both then and now – offering another example of how we can use our personal experience of the pandemic present to connect with the history we teach.

There are further parallels in the way that certain countries – notably Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand – participated in both World Wars. For these combatants, the home front was largely distinct from the battlefront, not just conceptually but geographically. With a few exceptions (such as the bombings of Pearl Harbour, USA, and Darwin, Australia) the war was taking place somewhere else – a very different situation from that experienced by people in Europe, North Africa, and East Asia. That distinction defines the Canadian wartime experience: the average un-enlisted citizen was involved in the war effort, but nowhere near the fighting of it – combat something that was done by other people in a different place. I think a lot of us have felt a bit like that during the pandemic. We’ve conscientiously done our part by staying home, keeping our distance, wearing masks, and washing our hands, but we’re also aware that there are people who have had to leave their homes regularly, working in essential services that support all of us. I remember being devastated the first time I saw images of health care professionals and support workers with scars on their faces from the face masks they had to wear non-stop as they put their lives on the line for the rest of us. Moments of recognition like that – being reminded of the far greater dangers some people are experiencing on the front lines – demand enormous respect.

Some of my family and friends really struggled with the fact that they were not engaged in any kind of essential work, during those uncertain early weeks of the shutdown. It was a sense of powerlessness, but also of ineffectualness, in the face of an emergency. As one friend put it: “I’m just at home. What the heck am I doing to help?” Meanwhile, others seemed to settle right into the situation, embracing their given role of flattening the curve by staying home and enduring a variety of inconveniences with a cheerful attitude. But regardless of how the stay-at-homes felt about their allotted role, there was still that clear distinction in terms of how different groups of people were participating in this overarching experience: the majority not directly exposed to the worst dangers or demands, and a minority risking their personal safety and being physically and emotionally drained by it. It’s another of those parallels with wartime that can give us a bit of personal insight into what it might have felt like to live through historical events.

Along these lines, Samantha observed that “the public” is not monolithic, and therefore the public response is not uniform or consistent. She was reminded of a conversation about the threat of nuclear war she once had with her grandmother, who was a housewife in the 1960s. While Samantha assumed her grandmother must have been scared about the Cold War, her grandmother’s actual response was: “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Some families were building backyard bomb shelters, but not hers. Rather than practicing duck-and-cover at home, they were dancing with their friends all night. This further reminded Samantha of an observation by historian Funké Aladejebi:  that if the people who are experiencing some event with you are all like you, so that there is no diversity of response, you have to think differently about the media, records, and other things that you’re using to make sense of the experience. There is always more than one way to view a situation, so if you’re not seeing any diverging viewpoints you need to look harder.

The Second Question:  In the future, do you think the ways that we will teach history or approach history as a researcher will look different as a result of this pandemic moment? 

My answer this question depended on which of my professional hats I was wearing. If I was still classroom teaching, I would be working into my lessons the little personal connections and parallels between past and present I discussed in my answer to the first question. Whether I was teaching wartime history or history of medicine it would be convenient to be able to draw on the fact that, for quite a number of years to come, my students would remember their own experience of the pandemic. There are so many things about the past that are entirely foreign to students today, so having this one event that everyone went through in some way would be a useful and potentially powerful tool – even if it was just to use as the catchy “hook” at the beginning of a lecture or an introductory activity to a lesson or discussion. The diversity among the students in our classrooms is a beautiful thing, but it also means that they don’t always have common points of reference with each other (let alone with the teacher). This pandemic has been so disruptive on so many levels that everyone who lived through it will remember that it happened and will have their own insights to draw on from the experience. For teachers trying to bring the past to life and highlight its relevance to students today it would be a missed opportunity not to draw on that.

With my archivist hat on, I don’t anticipate that the pandemic will change the shape of my work in the long term. In the short term archives have made adjustments, just like everywhere else. Right now Reading Rooms either aren’t open at all, or only by appointment, and there are brief quarantines for physical materials before and after they are shared with patrons. In archives that have reopened, both staff and patrons in shared spaces are wearing personal protective equipment, So obviously the public-access side of our work — facilitating other people’s historical research – looks a little different at the moment. But the behind-the-scenes work that we do to acquire, organize, describe, and preserve historical materials is untouched by the pandemic. Not only is it already fairly solitary work in a practical sense, but it’s also deeply rooted in the kinds of materials that we have and the things we need to do to them to make sure they survive into the future, and are discoverable by researchers. The pandemic has not changed any of that.

One way by which the pandemic greatly affects archives is its existence as an event of global, national, provincial, and local significance: unless we’re talking about a specialized institution like a Holocaust museum with a very narrow focus to what it collects, materials related to COVID-19 fit every archives’ mandate in some way, and therefore are worthy of being archived. As a result, there are all kinds of deliberate archival acquisition initiatives going on around the world – including in my own archives. We don’t always have the resources or time to go out and solicit donations, but in this instance a lot of archives (sometimes in conjunction with scholars) are doing just that. Either they are pro-actively collecting materials themselves, or they are soliciting the public to contribute records, images, and oral histories documenting their experiences of the pandemic.

This means that in future there will be a lot more material about COVID-19 in the archives for researchers and teachers to draw on, than there is about, say, the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918-1919. It’s quite difficult to find the Spanish flu in the archives, except in terms of governmental responses. There are newspaper reports and the odd photo of people wearing masks, but not nearly as much as you might expect – and even in letters or diaries it’s rare to find any significant commentary about it. I’m not sure exactly why that is, but I a few guesses. It could be that people were already exhausted by the Great War that had just finished and had no energy to comment on or record the subsequent epidemic. It could be that the higher percentage of the population that lived in rural areas (where the impact of restrictions on the size of gatherings and cancellation of events wouldn’t be as strikingly visible as in the cities) and the fact that people weren’t as highly connected (through the internet and social media) as we are today, made it seem somewhat less noteworthy than it actually was. Or maybe the actual health impact was so severe and the health care system of the time so much less robust than today that people were so busy dealing with the epidemic that they didn’t have time or energy to document it. To use anachronistic examples, they weren’t thinking, “Hey, I should document this in a daily blog” or “Maybe I’ll do a photo series of famous public places completely empty!” Not to mention, if they were laid off from their jobs or too sick to work, there was no special Spanish Flu government program designed to help keep them afloat. There are lots of potential contributing factors. But overall I suspect Canadians at the time treated the Spanish Flu epidemic as just another situation to be dealt with and persevered through – like a drought year that caused poor harvests, illnesses for which there was no vaccine or cure at the time, and other routine calamities.

By contrast, today Canadians have what we might call a “documenting” mindset. Thanks to camera phones and social media we now have a society in which people document everything from the food on their plates to their innermost thoughts about their sexuality with legions of followers. In that context it’s not surprising that people are thinking, “Hey, I’m having this interesting pandemic experience – I should record it.” Scads of material is being created and shared at the grassroots, so the role of archives, museums, and similar institutions is to gather some of it into a more permanent preservation space and curate it. There will be quite a lot of coronavirus material in the archives for future generations to discover, and hopefully it will capture a diverse swath of voices and experiences in different places That’s pretty exciting.

With my third hat on – that of someone working in a library context – I see the pandemic creating small changes in the relationships between university teaching faculty and my colleagues who are liaison librarians (that is, librarians assigned to a particular subject area like English, Science, or Social Work). Liaison librarians are the ones who purchase new resources related to those areas, offer specialist reference help to students and researchers working in those fields, and provide in-class sessions on information literacy for students. The idea is that there is a dedicated person (or people) in the library who can work closely with each faculty, department, or program at the university, supporting them in terms of resources and instruction. The degree to which this relationship actually works out in practice has a lot to do with the initiative of the librarian, but also (and as a former professor, I would say more so) on the awareness of faculty members and their willingness to make use of these opportunities.

When universities were forced to shift to an online teaching environment at the tail-end of the Winter 2020 semester, a lot of liaison librarians found themselves working more closely with their faculty members than they normally do. There was a large-scale turn to librarians by faculty members scrambling to reinvent themselves as online pedagogues. The challenge, of course, was: “How do I do what I already do well when I don’t have the resources – when the things that I use are not digital things that I can easily translate into this new environment?” It produced a lot of fruitful discussion  between librarians and faculty members around what alternative digital (and ideally open-access) resources existed to work around those challenges. If a professor could no longer do an in-class experiment, could the librarian find a high-quality video resource that demonstrated it instead? If a professor had assigned their students a chapter from an out-of-print book on 2-hour reserve and there was no e-book version, could the librarian quickly get copyright clearance and scan the resource for digital distribution to the class?

In short, there was a lot of mad scrambling behind-the-scenes, but it demonstrated the benefits of collaboration between teaching faculty and librarians, and helped rescue the end of the semester. Similar collaborations have been going on (although thankfully at a more humane pace and with less intensity) over the summer semester, as professors prepare for what looks likely to be a fully-online Fall 2020 semester (and perhaps beyond). It’s hard to say whether that kind of productive collaboration will outlast the pandemic or not. Professors tend to be very independent, so they might revert back to solo syllabus-development and last minute requests for course reserves or resource purchases, once the pandemic moment is over. Librarians certainly hope the new spirit of collaboration will continue, because they are trained information professionals with a lot to offer in support of teaching – not just a 20 minute presentation about plagiarism, but advanced searching skills and a wide knowledge of what resources are available.

Wearing her own second professional hat – as someone working in higher education – Samantha observed that librarians often struggle to work more collaboratively with faculty members who may not have understood that collaboration is the ideal model for working with librarians in a teaching capacity. She speculated that the pandemic might produce a greater understanding that teaching does not have to be a solitary activity and instead can be enriched by a collaboration between professionals who bring different skills and perspectives to the table.

This kind of shift would undoubtedly bring to the classroom greater resources and opportunities for teaching and learning. It would be great, Samantha said, if this also lead to more collaborative teaching teams or approaches to teaching within K-12 settings as well – where teachers and teacher-librarians are facing similar challenges in the altered context of the pandemic. Ultimately, she suggested, the pandemic has prompted teachers of all stripes to recognize that teaching is changing: it is no longer just an individual task. Accordingly, the resources that teachers need in order to teach has also changed. The altered context means teachers need to think differently about the ways in which they’re delivering content and how to make it the best content it can be.

The Third Question: How can we create greater circles of inclusion in the ways that we teach and learn Canadian history narratives? Not just to create multicultural narratives, but to ensure that different cultures of all kinds are able to shift and change what we understand as community. 

This was the question I found most difficult to answer, because it’s a little bit outside of my usual wheelhouse. I can say, however, that as someone who has studied and attempted to teach a very inclusive version of Canadian history, I’m heartened by what I’ve seen in the media as well as in conversation with people I know. There seems to be a pretty solid understanding of the differential impact of this pandemic: it has affected everyone, but with very different degrees of severity. I think most people understand that, and that’s encouraging.

In the first weeks and months of the pandemic in North America, when the majority of people were told to shelter-in-place, there was a real sense of unity and camaraderie in the air. People expressed it different ways, but you often heard statements like “we’re all in this together” or “we’re all in the same boat.” There’s comfort and strength in that sentiment: it seems hard-wired into us as humans that it’s less frightening to weather a storm with other people. But those reassuring sentiments mask the very different degrees to which people have suffered in this pandemic. The best way of phrasing it that I’ve come across was somebody who said: “We are not all in the same boat, but we’re in the same storm.” If you take that metaphor further, it can become a call to action in the here and now, expressing a sense of moral obligation to others: those of us in secure lifeboats need to reach out to the ones clinging to driftwood; if we’re well-stocked we need to share our freshwater and chocolate rations with a lifeboat full of people whose supplies were washed overboard.

What happens if we bring that metaphor back to archives and the teaching of history? Well, the story of a person’s experience in a ship at sea during a storm will be very different depending on whether they were in a lifeboat or clinging to driftwood, had supplies or not, were alone or with others, were rescued by the Coast Guard or left to drown. Each of those stories is important, and needs to be recognized, valued, and told. In terms of our individual experiences with the coronavirus, we see a similar diversity. Has the pandemic primarily been an inconvenience to you? Has it made itself most felt as a mental health struggle? Neither of those things is negligible or unimportant. Quite the opposite. But those experiences have different short- and long-term effects than losing your job or small business because of the pandemic shutdown. Likewise someone whose special needs child has not been getting the support that they need in a classroom or institutional setting because schools closed and online learning was not viable for them. Those whose loved ones are most vulnerable because of age of pre-existing condition, or who have had loved ones die from the virus, present yet another set of experiences. And of course people who have spent the pandemic working in health care or other essential service settings are yet another case entirely.

In other words, it’s crucial that we recognize that we’re not in the same boat (even it’s still reassuring to say that we are). Although our catchphrases don’t make it clear, I do think people have become aware over the past months of the pandemic that it has affected people in very different ways. That in turn paves the way for diversity in terms of how people will describe their experiences, how those things will find their way into archives, and eventually into the works that will be created – from curriculum and lesson plans to museum exhibits and histories of the pandemic – in years to come. I am cautiously optimistic that this recognition of diversity will make its way all the way along the chain from grassroots documentation to interpretation and teaching.

Picking up on the storm metaphor, Samantha noted that, if we are reporting on the storm as a whole, we need to be aware of the ways that our lifeboat experience looks different from that of others.  Recognizing inequity and commenting on it in our reporting can be a step toward addressing those inequities. As an example, she mentioned that both of us are single women working from home, with dedicated home office space and no childcare or eldercare demands. We have secure jobs, and therefore our experiences are very different from, say, that of her neighbour down the hall who has children. 

        She also mentioned reports that have circulated about female scholars not submitting academic journal articles during the pandemic at the same rate as in pre-pandemic times (or the same rate as male scholars during the pandemic) and how that will have an effect on their careers down the road, in terms of grants, promotion, and tenure. Parents generally (but especially mothers) seem to be at capacity in terms of their ability to negotiate this situation. One result of that is that the people who are documenting this moment are those with the time and privilege to do so. Samantha was able to have her Pandemic Pedagogy video conversations because she did not have children to care for, had a dedicated home office space, and owned a laptop with a webcam. For this reason we need to think carefully about the records we find in the archives: who created them, under what circumstances, and what they include or exclude.

Despite my optimism overall, there are also ways in which the diversity of people’s pandemic experiences have not been recognized. I had a memorable conversation early on in the pandemic shutdown period with a friend who was in the same doctoral program as me years ago. He has ended up working completely outside of History and academe, and in this pandemic moment specifically, has been a frontline worker in an essential service setting. When we spoke he was doing well and taking the proper precautions, but had a bee in his bonnet about how the pandemic was being presented in the public sphere. It really drove him crazy that so much of what was appearing in both social and traditional media in the early weeks of the shutdown was of the ““what are you baking during the pandemic?” variety, or people advising others to use the time at home to learn a new language or declutter. He saw this as a completely out-of-touch bourgeois experience of the pandemic, bearing absolutely no relation to the service he and his coworkers were struggling to provide so that others could have the luxury of staying safely at home, or their daily experience interacting with the public.

This portrayal maintained a tenacious hold until the death of George Floyd sparked a wave of anti-Black racism protests in the USA, Canada, and Europe and made Facebook posts about pandemic baking (etc.) seem unsuitably frivolous. I was therefore very glad to have that conversation with my friend, who was one of the few people I knew who was having a completely different pandemic experience than me and the only one with the scholarly training to analyze it in the way he was doing. His insights pretty much shattered my own previous notions of what the pandemic looked like for other people. I realized I needed to go beyond my own immediate social circle if I wanted to truly understand what was going on, how it was affecting people, and therefore what kinds of experiences I should try to collect for my archives.

Samantha rounded out our video conversation by reflecting on the fact that these kinds of insights will continue to have power to shape our understandings in future. As the pandemic continues to unfold, teachers (and others) are under so many pressures that they may not be able to engage with big ideas. But the significance of these ideas will not end whenever the pandemic runs its course. Echoes of this conversation, and others, have the potential to resonate for many months, years, and generations to come.