Pandemic from the Margins: How United-States-Based College Students Think the Pandemic Should Be Remembered

Abstract

In the midst of a memory boom, the overlap** interconnected upheavals of COVID-19 and protests against police brutality prompted the authors, faculty members at two universities in the United States, to each design an assignment for our undergraduate students to memorialize their experiences of the virus and the racial-justice protests of 2020 by creating virtual memorials and monuments. We asked the students who are predominantly people of color from low income and immigrant communities, to reflect on what appeared to us to be the dominant experiences of the preceding year: pandemic and protest. This chapter offers a unique perspective on what the generations born after the AIDS epidemic or 9/11/2001 imagines when they are the actual actors of memorialization rather than the intended target of the transmission of the past. Furthermore, the authors argue that given the circumstances of Covid and the Summer for Black Lives occurring simultaneously in their own communities, it was inevitable that these late teens and early twenty-somethings would make links between social protest, Covid, and collective memory when imagining how the pandemic will be remembered in the future.