Introduction

Much of the strong impulse to “go remote” with oral history practice was tied to a desire to organize rapid-response projects to document the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic was impacting communities around the globe. Oral history in the midst or immediate aftermath of crisis is a phenomenon that has become an increasingly common application of the methodology since the turn of the twenty-first century. ¹ Oral historians were drawn to study the impact of a pandemic on the global citizenry from a host of angles, a disruption of life that an epidemiological event had not caused on such a scale in over one hundred years. New projects emerged at a frenzied pace to gather oral histories around the globe. In the second section of this volume, you will find several examples of such work: accounts from our colleagues around the world about how they approached doing oral history remotely and the decisions they had to make.