Documenting Community, 2020: CU Boulder Course-Related Student Reflections
The Documenting Community, 2020 project has drawn submissions from students across campus. Student work from courses from the departments of History, English, and the Program for Writing and Rhetoric appear in the following pages. We are grateful to Professor David Shneer and Professor Paul Sutter (History), Maxwell Cassity (Lecturer, English), Teresa Nugent (Instructor, English), and Danny Long (Instructor, Program for Writing and Rhetoric) for their support and for their students' contributions. Each played a key role in providing a forum through which students considered the place of pandemics and quarantines past and present.
Writing in the spring of 2020, the late Professor David Shneer (History; Jewish Studies; and Religious Studies) noted that 'These are extraordinary times. As the nation and the planet pivot to suppress the spread of the virus responsible for COVID 19, all of our lives and routines will be affected and upended. We will continue, to the degree possible with our technology, to maintain our relationships, try to do our jobs and continue our classes, try to carry on — but you are living through a world historical event that has the potential to change our society in permanent ways we can only begin to glimpse today.'
Danny Long (Program for Writing and Rhetoric), whose students likewise contributed work to the project, stressed that 'we are living in strange times. It is likely—no, inevitable—that future generations will write and discuss the COVID-19 pandemic. Books will be written. Lectures will be given. Memorials will be constructed ... It is therefore critical that we, who are living through the pandemic, record our experiences of it. If we don’t describe our experiences, others will describe them for us.'
Maxwell Cassity's (English) Epidemic Literature in the Time of Covid-19/Sars CoV2 Pandemic asked students to consider how 'epidemic diseases and their effects—both real and imagined—have been determinative forces in constructing US history and identity. The stories we tell each other and ourselves about epidemic disease—its origins, its vectors of contagion, its symptoms and their symbolisms—reflect larger historical, scientific, and aesthetic movements that have shaped US culture.'