Doing Community History: Asian Americans and the Pandemic

Students utilize a community-engaged oral history methodology to produce short video documentaries focused on Asian Americans in the Covid-19 pandemic. In producing these collaborative digital history projects, students learn to evaluate the ways social power influences historical documentation at various levels including the making of sources, the construction of archives, and the telling of historical narratives. We ask: how have race and racism, ethnicity and community, gender and class, shaped the ways that the pandemic has influenced the lives of Asian Americans? To what extent have Asian American experiences with the pandemic been shaped by the recent global protests for racial justice and Black liberation? In studying the pandemic and its relationship to histories of race and racism, how should we understand the place of Asian Americans?