“I Wanted to Be Part of Not Forgetting”: Digital Mediation and Memory in Post-Pandemic Times

Using focus groups, I examine how a diverse group of adults from a major American East Coast city engaged with oral pandemic narratives from Corona Diaries , a digital archive launched in March 2020. Participants reported that listening to the stories from the archive helped them process personal memories of COVID-19 and reflect on the pandemic’s politicization in the present. The recordings also prompted new critical understandings of illness, loss, incarceration, and other pandemic-related experiences. These findings suggest that digital archives may not only preserve individual experiences but may also aid in fostering future collective reflection and commemoration practices that center listening, dialogue, and local engagement to ground communities’ connections to traumatic events. The discussion explores how crisis moments can provide generative opportunities for researchers to experiment with critical, collaborative, and creative methods for understanding the individual and collective experiences of a given crisis beyond its unfolding.