Oral Histories Help Communities Reckon with COVID-19

A new study by Adetobi Moses, upcoming doctoral graduate at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, offers a window into how communities process collective trauma and makes the case for oral histories as a powerful tool for preserving memories of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Moses found that listening to and discussing oral histories might be key to helping people come to terms with one of the most disruptive events in recent history. For her study, “‘I Wanted to Be Part of Not Forgetting’: Digital Mediation and Memory in Post-Pandemic Times,” published in the journal Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, she had 22 Philadelphia-area residents listen and respond to ten audio diaries recorded during the pandemic.

Between 2023 and 2024, Moses hosted three focus groups of six to nine adults each. One session was held in person; the remaining two took place over Zoom. During each session, participants listened to 10 recordings selected from a digital archive called "Corona Diaries."

This web platform, created by fellows from Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism and by developer and sound artist Halsey Burgund, allows anyone from around the world to document their pandemic experiences in audio. These oral histories touched on three recurring themes, Moses says: the toll of social isolation, a yearning for community during lockdown, and various forms of precarity (financial, academic, and medical) that defined life during the crisis.

To guide their experience, Moses asked participants to pay particular attention to stories that resonated with or unsettled them, and to engage with all the background sounds in the recording. After each diary was played, participants wrote down their initial reactions, and a group discussion followed.

Remembering Together

The focus groups revealed the profound emotional weight that audio storytelling can communicate, Moses wrote. Many participants reported that hearing the diaries, rather than reading them, immersed them in the speaker's experience and triggered vivid personal memories of the pandemic's early days.

At the same time, some participants worried that hearing a diarist's voice could invite assumptions about their race, socioeconomic background, or other identity markers, potentially introducing bias into the listening experience.

Overall, listening to the diaries prompted participants to reflect on their own pandemic experiences and break down how they vastly differed from others’, Moses noticed. “A formally incarcerated man, for example, spotlighted the privilege of being able to sit at home and record an audio story, a stark contrast from how he experienced the pandemic,” she says. “Another participant spoke of losing a family member and not being able to grieve properly, while another spoke of Zoom meeting fatigue.”

Why It Matters

Moses believes that engaging in close listening and dialogue is particularly useful for studying crises, and that audio archives play a critical role in preserving and making accessible the personal testimonies of people who lived through COVID-19.

For her, the study raises larger questions about how societies remember, and are at risk of forgetting, the human cost of global crises. She points to classrooms, libraries, museums, and future public memorials as settings where oral histories could facilitate ongoing collective reckonings with the individual lives and experiences shaped by the pandemic.

"I hope this study can encourage other researchers to push against institutional forgetting and dive into new ways to carry the lessons of the pandemic into the public sphere,” Moses says. “Used thoughtfully, digital technologies can re-integrate memories of global crises into individual, local, and social life, and I hope my work provides future researchers with insight into which features of pandemic stories and experiences may resonate with audiences in public memory environments.”