This project seeks to understand how COVID-19 has shaped protests for racial justice in the summer and fall of 2020. The creators are collecting rapid-response oral histories for public and scholarly research online and findings will also be used to mount an exhibition on the relationship between the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement. This project has been designed so that professional researchers and the broader public can create and upload their oral histories to the database. The COVID-19 Oral History Project is housed at the IUPUI Arts & Humanities Institute and is a partner project with The Journal of the Plague Year: An Archive of COVID-19.
The COVID-19 Oral History Project uses approaches grounded in oral history best practices as defined by the Oral History Association as well as in the anthropological code of ethics as defined by the American Anthropological Association (“Principles of Professional Responsibility”).
The racially disparate health outcomes of COVID-19 are well documented. By documenting the perceived experience of racial justice protest participants, this projects hopes to better understand the lived experience of disparities in this time of concurrent crises (health, racial, economic). The project aims to create an archive that does not silence diverse voices but highlights them, preserving them for future practitioners, researchers, and policymakers.
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Indianapolis, Indiana, USA