TY - JOUR
T1 - The Oral History of “Pandemic Time”
T2 - Students’ Lives Through the Global COVID-19 Pandemic
AU - Fritzová, Marie
AU - Ben-Shalom, Uzi
AU - Stern, Nehemia
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2024 The Oral History Association.
PY - 2024
Y1 - 2024
N2 - This article offers a reflective account of student memories of the first years of the COVID-19 pandemic in both the Czech Republic and Israel. By comparing the narratives of students from these nations, we introduce the notion of “pandemic time” to describe the ways in which personal experiences of time rest betwixt and between objective historical events and individual meaning-making. In this way, we argue that university students narrated the crisis inherent in pandemic time on two overlapping levels. On the one hand, students’ memories revolved around the broader objective timeline of the COVID-19 pandemic (to include specific dates of lockdowns, university closures, openings, etc.). On the other hand, our student informants in both countries appeared to experience these events in ways that diverged from this objective timeline. Specific events in both countries that appeared to supersede the health threat posed by the pandemic shaped how they recounted their experiences of the pandemic. Using narrative analysis, we identified several key themes to explore student perspectives about pandemic time: how social isolation impacted an understanding of time, both referentially (when things happened in relation to each other) and temporally (within the overall span of the pandemic); how our narrators perceived the pandemic overall; broad and intimate experiences with COVID-19; how long remote learning lasted; and when narrators perceived the pandemic as having ended. By exploring this concept of pandemic time, we show how an international focus on oral history across national and cultural boundaries makes it possible to tease apart diverging experiences of time, memory, and crisis and to demonstrate how that relates directly to oral history theory and methodology.
AB - This article offers a reflective account of student memories of the first years of the COVID-19 pandemic in both the Czech Republic and Israel. By comparing the narratives of students from these nations, we introduce the notion of “pandemic time” to describe the ways in which personal experiences of time rest betwixt and between objective historical events and individual meaning-making. In this way, we argue that university students narrated the crisis inherent in pandemic time on two overlapping levels. On the one hand, students’ memories revolved around the broader objective timeline of the COVID-19 pandemic (to include specific dates of lockdowns, university closures, openings, etc.). On the other hand, our student informants in both countries appeared to experience these events in ways that diverged from this objective timeline. Specific events in both countries that appeared to supersede the health threat posed by the pandemic shaped how they recounted their experiences of the pandemic. Using narrative analysis, we identified several key themes to explore student perspectives about pandemic time: how social isolation impacted an understanding of time, both referentially (when things happened in relation to each other) and temporally (within the overall span of the pandemic); how our narrators perceived the pandemic overall; broad and intimate experiences with COVID-19; how long remote learning lasted; and when narrators perceived the pandemic as having ended. By exploring this concept of pandemic time, we show how an international focus on oral history across national and cultural boundaries makes it possible to tease apart diverging experiences of time, memory, and crisis and to demonstrate how that relates directly to oral history theory and methodology.
KW - COVID-19
KW - Czech Republic
KW - Israel
KW - pandemic time
KW - student memories
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85198628918&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/00940798.2024.2375491
DO - 10.1080/00940798.2024.2375491
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AN - SCOPUS:85198628918
SN - 0094-0798
JO - Oral History Review
JF - Oral History Review
ER -