Thread by @JohLewis

“More with less: Academic practice for the COVID generation” 📚🦠
Stories and reflections from Johanna Lewis (JL) and Daniel Murchison (DM) @Daniel14382460
Department of History, York University
@PMTC2021 #PandemicMethodologies #CdnHist

@Daniel14382460 @PMTC2021 We are part of academia’s COVID generation - ours is a cohort of scholars whose graduate studies coincided with the global pandemic. COVID has produced many personal & professional challenges and changed how we do history: we have had to do more with less. #PandemicMethodologies

@Daniel14382460 @PMTC2021 Archives, the fetishized foundation of historical practice, have been made even more inaccessible than usual by the closures of institutions and borders. How/can historians work in this context? & What lessons emerge from our adaptive strategies? #PandemicMethodologies

@Daniel14382460 @PMTC2021 JL: Without access to all the sources I intended to use this year, I was forced to return to what I had. Re-reading, re-interpreting, re-membering – new insights, connections, slippages became clear. Facing barriers to breadth, I was pushed to read deeper. #PandemicMethodologies

@Daniel14382460 @PMTC2021 DM: It seemed that, as an historical materialist inclined toward digital methods, scarcity would realign concepts. The old questions of text-search, visualization + aggregation pressed further. For me, it was about humanity that underlines a number. #PandemicMethodologies

@Daniel14382460 @PMTC2021 Daily routines, weekly schedules, annual goals were ruptured and rearranged for everyone – but in diverse ways. Some faced an abundance of (anxious, isolated) time – others faced unprecedented labour (“essential” & unsafe, reproductive & unending) #PandemicMethodologies

@Daniel14382460 @PMTC2021 JL: I have 2 young kids and have been full-time caregiving for over a year. This has radically reshaped my work life. Where I could once only write on spacious empty days, I now scrape together stolen hours and string together stolen paragraphs. #PandemicMethodologies

@Daniel14382460 @PMTC2021 DM: My house, a couple and a cat, did not become a shared space of paid remote work. This played with time + the many kinds of work in ways I have not fully grasped. Shared time became scarce + work increasingly directed toward cultivating and relishing it #PandemicMethodologies

@Daniel14382460 @PMTC2021 The events of 2020/1 pulled our attention from academic labour, yet revealed our own historicity: mass illness & death, the violence & inequalities at the heart of capitalism; anti-Black racism & policing; colonialism & genocide; xenophobia & imperialism. #PandemicMethodologies

@Daniel14382460 @PMTC2021 JL: My work felt non-essential & I spent the year engaged in organizing re pandemic-era injustice. But current reckonings inform the questions I ask of history too - about memory, power, the responsibilities of white settlers in a world shaped by empire... #PandemicMethodologies

@Daniel14382460 @PMTC2021 DM: The scale/kind of screen usage will remain a mystery. I replaced news scrolling w/ webcam writing time + chats. This move (remaking attention + community) informed the ed. team @lefthistory to craft an issue on left approaches to digital history #PandemicMethodologies

@Daniel14382460 @PMTC2021 @lefthistory A year of more & less. So much: grief, rage, anxiety, distraction, uncertainty, precarity, loss. Not enough: time, space, resources, support, focus, security, access. An experience both widely shared and so inequitably, horrifically distributed. #PandemicMethodologies

@Daniel14382460 @PMTC2021 @lefthistory Comprehensive exams and glances at the literature illuminate theory and relay world-historical transformations. Important lesson of this process: the historical circumstances of the writer matter and shape questions asked and answered. Thank you! #PandemicMethodologies