Commemorating and documenting the first four years of COVID-19
DATE POSTED: AUGUST 2, 2024.
On March 5, 2024, the disaster historian Scott Gabriel Knowles served as the lead-off speaker for the Rituals in the Making’s pandemic reflection series. The virtual seminar, “Memory Loss: COVID as a Slow Disaster,” featuring Dr. Knowles was the third of its kind that RIM hosted during the 2023-2024 academic year (see our dispatches on the previous seminars held on October 27th and January 26th).
Dr. Knowles joined us virtually from South Korea, where he is currently a professor at KAIST — the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology Graduate School of Science and Technology Policy.
The seminar was hosted by:
- Roy Richard Grinker, Professor of Anthropology at The George Washington University who is currently studying COVID-19 grief, mourning, and memorialization with RIM.
- Sebastian Sirais, senior undergraduate student at The George Washington University and research assistant with the RIM team.
The entire seminar can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROokItF_r9s
Since March of 2020, Knowles has hosted #COVIDCalls every weekday. #COVIDCalls is a live podcast discussion of the COVID-19 pandemic dedicated to facilitating conversations with experts, policymakers, and other individuals affected by the pandemic to better understand its effect on global society.
Dr. Knowles’ lecture for the March 5th virtual seminar examined the periodization of the COVID-19 pandemic. The 40-minute presentation was accompanied by a 20-minute Q&A session, with GWU academics and attendees from across the COVID advocacy landscape participating.
Below are a few excerpts from his presentation:
History is not a guidebook. History is a creative act. When we go into the past, we collect data and stitch it together to frame a story that helps us understand the present. That’s not a unique idea to me. E.H. Carr argued that in 1961.
The historian doesn’t make up the past, but she or he in the selection and collection of the sources that she or he uses creates a past which is usable. So when we are afraid of losing the past, we should also be aware that we’re actively engaged in the creation of history that we’re using in the moment. And that’s a process of revealing some things and obscuring others. And it can take a lot of different forms.
Why were we making all of these projects? In part, I think we were making these projects because it was, it is I hope still an age of activism. Disaster injustice is real. People have died who didn’t need to die. People have suffered who didn’t need to suffer. That’s injustice, and in free societies we need to call that what it is and we need to take action.
So, memory loss in terms of COVID has to do first and foremost … The fear that we had, that we were losing the present; we’ve got to make sure people don’t forget this terrible thing we’re going through.
We experience disasters at global scale now, and so what about intergenerational loss and trauma? Shouldn’t we think about memorialization as a trauma reduction strategy, maybe even for people who haven’t been born yet, and what types of memorials do we need? What kind of a COVID memorial do we need for a person who hasn’t been born yet? That might be a way of asking this question. What’s the difference between forgetting and healing? People who have not been born yet are still going to need healing from the disaster of COVID. What kind of memorials can be made to promote that healing, and at the same time avoid authoritarianism?