Socially engaged oral history pedagogy amid the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

In response to the OHR editors' prompt regarding important considerations for teaching oral history during disasters and pandemics, this article presents a case study model for developing socially engaged and collaborative pedagogy that centers on the ethics of conducting oral history in the present moment of crisis and hiatus. Central to our oral history research and pedagogical concerns about teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic are inquiries such as, what conditions create an ethical time for recording history? How can we use oral histories about the pandemic to address the normalized conditions of precarity and instability that millions in the United States and around the world face on a daily basis? In addressing these concerns, we also gesture towards developing a participatory mode of history making that redresses historical erasure, misrepresentation, and underrepresentation.