The Oral History of “Pandemic Time”: Students’ Lives Through the Global COVID-19 Pandemic

ABSTRACT

This article offers a reflective account of student memories of the first years of the COVID-19 pandemic in both the Czech Republic and Israel. By comparing the narratives of students from these nations, we introduce the notion of “pandemic time” to describe the ways in which personal experiences of time rest betwixt and between objective historical events and individual meaning-making. In this way, we argue that university students narrated the crisis inherent in pandemic time on two overlapping levels. On the one hand, students’ memories revolved around the broader objective timeline of the COVID-19 pandemic (to include specific dates of lockdowns, university closures, openings, etc.). On the other hand, our student informants in both countries appeared to experience these events in ways that diverged from this objective timeline. Specific events in both countries that appeared to supersede the health threat posed by the pandemic shaped how they recounted their experiences of the pandemic. Using narrative analysis, we identified several key themes to explore student perspectives about pandemic time: how social isolation impacted an understanding of time, both referentially (when things happened in relation to each other) and temporally (within the overall span of the pandemic); how our narrators perceived the pandemic overall; broad and intimate experiences with COVID-19; how long remote learning lasted; and when narrators perceived the pandemic as having ended. By exploring this concept of pandemic time, we show how an international focus on oral history across national and cultural boundaries makes it possible to tease apart diverging experiences of time, memory, and crisis and to demonstrate how that relates directly to oral history theory and methodology.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• Czech Republic
• Israel
• pandemic time
• student memories

Acknowledgments

We thank all our student narrators who shared their experiences of the pandemic time with us.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflicts of interest are reported by the authors(s).

Notes

^1. See also Anna F. Kaplan, “Cultivating Supports while Venturing into Interviewing during COVID-19,” Oral History Review 47, no. 2 (2020): 214–26.

^2. We elaborate on this fact at the end of the article. This article was written immediately after the end of the research investigation; that is, in 2022. Several links have been updated, and the overall atmosphere and relevance of the article pertain to students’ experiences with the pandemic up to and including the year 2022.

^3. “CDC Museum COVID-19 Timeline,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), last modified March 15, 2023, https://www.cdc.gov/museum/timeline/covid19.html.

^4. “Timeline: WHO’s COVID-19 Response,” World Health Organization (WHO), accessed April 29, 2022, https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/interactive-timeline#event-7.

^5. According to the CDC, “A variant of high consequence would require notification to WHO under the International Health Regulations, reporting to CDC, an announcement of strategies to prevent or contain transmission, and recommendations to update treatments and vaccines. Currently, no SARS-CoV-2 variants are designated as VOHC. Classifications may change over time, based on the information available..” “SARS-CoV-2 Variant Classifications and Definitions,” CDC, last modified September 1, 2023, https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/variants/variant-classifications.html.

^6. Jason M. Kelly, “The COVID-19 Oral History Project: Some Preliminary Notes from the Field,” Oral History Review 47, no. 2 (2020): 240.

^7. Nükhet Varlık, “New Science and Old Sources: Why the Ottoman Experience of Plague Matters,” Medieval Globe 1, no. 1 (2015): 193–227; Ryan Davis, The Spanish Flu: Narrative and Cultural Identity in Spain, 1918 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

^8. Jennifer A. Cramer, “ ‘First, Do No Harm’: Tread Carefully Where Oral History, Trauma, and Current Crises Intersect,” Oral History Review, 47, no. 2 (2020): 211. See also Anna F. Kaplan, “Cultivating Supports While Venturing into Interviewing during COVID-19,” Oral History Review 47, no. 2 (2020): 222.

^9. Cramer, “ ‘First, Do No Harm,’ ” 208–9.

^10. The interviews and research presented in this article (as well as the majority of the writing) were completed before the current war in Gaza that began in October 2023.

^11. We assume that this collective representation comes from collective awareness of memories. See Maurice Halbwachs, “The Social Frameworks of Memory,” in On Collective Memory, ed. Lewis A. Coser (London, UK: Heritage of Sociology Series, 1992), 37–167.

^12. Stephen M. Sloan, “Behind the ‘Curve’: COVID-19, Infodemic, and Oral History,” Oral History Review 47, no. 2 (2020): 193–202.

^13. Kelly, “The COVID-19 Oral History Project,” 240–52.

^14. Evan Faulkenbury, “Journalism, COVID-19, and the Opportunity of Oral History,” Oral History Review 47, no. 2 (2020): 253–59; Ana Paulina Lee and Kimberly Springer, “Socially Engaged Oral History Pedagogy amid the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Oral History Review 47, no. 2 (2020): 227–39.

^15. Kristen J. Nyitray, Dana Reijerkerk, and Chris Kretz, “ ‘There Will Be an End, but We Don’t Know When’: Preserving Diverse COVID-19 Pandemic Experiences through Oral History,” Collections 18, no. 2 (2022): 280–300.

^16. We assume that this collective representation comes from collective awareness of memories. See Halbwachs, “The Social Frameworks of Memory,” 37–167.

^17. “ … for the oral historian the concept of collective memory makes sense to us, but our experience interviewing respondents on an intimate basis prevents us from seeing how their narratives may merely be an expression of a collective consciousness.” Lynn Abrams, Oral History Theory (New York: Routledge, 2010), 96.

^18. Geri Miller, Fundamentals of Crisis Counseling. (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2012).

^19. “Crisis and Trauma,” Counseling and Psychological Service, Seattle University, https://www.seattleu.edu/caps/resources/crisis-and-trauma/.

^20. Cramer, “ ‘First, Do No Harm,’ ” 204.

^21. “Trauma,” Psychology Topics, American Psychological Association, accessed January 23, 2022, https://www.apa.org/topics/trauma.

^22. Ann Enander, “Psychology of Crisis and Trauma,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2021).

^23. Halbwachs, “The Social Frameworks of Memory,” 37–167.

^24. We assume that the current time is very suitable from this point of view for our oral history research, because the near past of the pandemic is still very recent and continues to impact our narrators’ lives. See also Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life [in French] (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008); Émile Durkheim, Pravidla Sociologické Metody [The rules of sociological method] (Prague, CZ: Orbis, 1926); and Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory [in French] (Paris, FR: Alcan, 1896; trans., New York: Zone Books, 1990).

^25. Maurice Halbwachs, Kolektivni Paměť [On collective memory] (1992; repr., Prague, CZ: Sociologické Nakladatelství SLON, 2009).

^26. Halbwachs, Kolektivni Paměť [On collective memory], 73.

^27. Halbwachs, Kolektivni Paměť [On collective memory], 92.

^28. Veridiana Domingos Cordeiro, “Conceptual (Re)construction of Maurice Halbwachs’ Theory of Collective Memory” (session on collective memory, American Sociological Association Annual Congress, Chicago, IL, August 20, 2015), 16, https://convention2.allacademic.com/one/asa/asa/index.php?cmd=Download+Document&key=unpublished_manuscript&file_index=4&pop_up=true&no_click_key=true&attachment_style=attachment&PHPSESSID=qrci83vt7s8pot2hkkkusdirpd; see also Jiří Šubrt, Nicolas Maslowski, and Štěpánka Lehmann, “Maurice Halbwachs, koncept rámců paměti a kolektivní paměti,” in Kolektivní paměť: K teoretickým otázkám, ed. Nicolas Maslowski, Jiří Šubrt, and Vendula Kadlečková (Prague, CZ: Karolinum, 2014), 15–31.

^29. Abrams, Oral History Theory, 96.

^30. Alessandro Portelli, “Tryin’ to Gather a Little Knowledge: Some Thoughts on the Ethics of Oral History,” in The Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue, ed. Alessandro Portelli (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 57; Paul Thompson, “Memory and the Self,” The Voice of the Past: Oral History, ed. Paul Thompson (1978; repr., Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000), 184.

^31. Natalia Botero-Jaramillo, Jessica Mora-Blanco, and Nelson Daniel Quesada-Jiménez, “Oral History and Memories of Hansen’s Disease Patients in Two Colombian Leper Colonies: Life Trajectories, Conflicts and Resistance Strategies” [in Spanish], História, Ciências, Saúde – Manguinhos 24, no. 4 (2017): 5; Abrams, Oral History Theory, 103. We found a similar approach by Richard Jenkins and Thomas Eriksen, who considered social identity as being inextricably linked with the individual identity. See Richard Jenkins, Social Identity (London, UK: Routledge, 1996), 19–20.

^32. “Theories of collective and popular memory have been immensely useful to oral historians seeking to interpret the ways in which individuals recall the past mainly because, as historians, although we are interested in people’s personal memories, we want to be able to use these to paint a larger canvas.” Abrams, Oral History Theory, 99.

^33. Aleksander Aristovnik et al., “Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Life of Higher Education Students: A Global Perspective,” Sustainability 12, no. 20 (2020): 8438; C. Owusu-Fordjour, C. K. Koomson, and D. Hanson, “The Impact of COVID-19 on Learning—the Perspective of the Ghanaian Student,” European Journal of Education Studies 7, no. 3 (2020): 96; Julianne LaRosa et al., “Life during COVID-19: The Student Experience,” Pedagogy in Health Promotion 8, no. 2 (2022): 126–33; Pradeep Sahu, “Closure of Universities Due to Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19): Impact on Education and Mental Health of Students and Academic Staff,” Cureus 12, no. 4 (2020): e7541; Tianhua Chen and Mike Lucock, “The Mental Health of University Students during the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Online Survey in the UK,” PLoS ONE 17, no. 1 (2022): e0262562; Changwon Son et al., “Effects of COVID-19 on College Students’ Mental Health in the United States: Interview Survey Study,” Journal of Medical Internet Research 22, no. 9 (2020): e21279.

^34. Heather Fraser, “Doing Narrative Research: Analysing Personal Stories Line by Line,” Qualitative Social Work 3, no. 2 (2004): 189–91.

^35. Fraser, “Doing Narrative Research,” 189–91; Marie-Francoise Chanfrault-Duchet, “Narrative Structures, Social Models and Symbolic Representation in Life Story,” in Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History, ed. Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai (London, UK: Routledge, 1991), 77–92.

^36. V., interviewed by Marie Fritzová, Pilsen, Czechia (online), March 12, 2022. All interviews with Czech students were conducted in Czech, and the excerpts were translated to English.

^37. T., interviewed by Marie Fritzová, Pilsen, Czechia, January 24, 2022.

^38. L., interviewed by Marie Fritzová, Pilsen, Czechia, February 8, 2022.

^39. J., interviewed by Marie Fritzová, Pilsen, Czechia, January 24, 2022.

^40. M., interviewed by Marie Fritzová, Pilsen, Czechia, January 24, 2022.

^41. See Alessandro Portelli, “The Peculiarities of Oral History,” History Workshop, no. 12 (Autumn, 1981): 98–99; Alessandro Portelli, “There’s Gonna Always Be a Line: History-Telling as a Multivocal Art,” in The Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue, ed. Alessandro Portelli (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 24–39; Fraser, “Doing Narrative Research,” 191–92.

^42. Fraser, “Doing Narrative Research,” 194–96.

^43. Ruta Clair et al., “The Effects of Social Isolation on Well-Being and Life Satisfaction during Pandemic,” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 8 (2021): article 28; Samantha K. Brooks et al., “The Psychological Impact of Quarantine and How to Reduce It: Rapid Review of the Evidence,” Lancet 395, no. 10227 (2020): 912–20; Hannes Zacher and Cort W. Rudolph, “Individual Differences and Changes in Subjective Wellbeing during the Early Stages of the COVID-19 Pandemic,” American Psychologist 76, no. 1 (2021): 50–62; Jay J. Van Bavel et al., “Using Social and Behavioural Science to Support COVID-19 Pandemic Response,” Nature Human Behaviour 4, no. 5 (2020): 460–71.

^44. Brooks et al., “The Psychological Impact of Quarantine,” 912–20; Ben J. Smith and Michelle H. Lim, “How the COVID-19 Pandemic Is Focusing Attention on Loneliness and Social Isolation,” Public Health Research and Practice 30, no. 2 (2020): e3022008.

^45. J. interview, January 24, 2022.

^46. J., interviewed by Marie Fritzová, Pilsen, Czechia (online), May 1, 2022.

^47. M. interview, January 24, 2022.

^48. My., interviewed by Marie Fritzová, Jerusalem, Israel, April 19, 2022. All interviews with Israeli students were conducted in English; Y., interviewed by Marie Fritzová, Jerusalem, Israel, April 19, 2022; P. interviewed by Marie Fritzová (online), April 19, 2022.

^49. Susan Slowikowski and Judy Motion, “Unlocking Meaning of Embodied Memories from Bushfire Survivors,” Oral History Review 48, no. 1 (2021): 89.

^50. Y. interview, March 24, 2022.

^51. My. interview, March 31, 2022.

^52. We identified six Czech stories that spoke of a strong influence of social isolation compared to only two such Israeli stories.

^53. Appeared in the following narrators’ interviews: Ma., M., Th., Mr., V., L., P., J., Al., El.

^54. Appeared in the following narrators’ interviews: My., Y., G., B., E., N.

^55. We identified five Czech stories in which narrators noted the pandemic had a strong influence on their life, whereas only three Israeli narrators noted the same strong influence.

^56. P., interviewed by Marie Fritzová, Pilsen, Czechia (online), March 9, 2022.

^57. M. interview, January 24, 2022. The same feeling was also described by Ma. in his story: “This is what my family members often say to me, ‘this (pandemic) didn’t hit you much, you’re in college,’ but they don’t realize that in the biggest, worst wave, I passed a states exam! And then entrance exams. So, it was really hard, wasn’t it?” Ma., interviewed by Marie Fritzová, Pilsen, Czechia, January 24, 2022.

^58. T., interviewed by Marie Fritzová, Jerusalem, Israel, April 7, 2022.

^59. N., interviewed by Marie Fritzová, Jerusalem, Israel, April 4, 2022.

^60. S., interviewed by Marie Fritzová, Israel, April 11, 2022.

^61. V. interview, March 12, 2022.

^62. B., T., N., My., L., and El., according to their responses to a verified qualitative questionnaire, May 2022.

^63. D., G., S., Th., J., and Mr., according to their responses to a verified qualitative questionnaire, May 2022.

^64. B., interviewed by Marie Fritzová, Jerusalem, Israel, April 6, 2022.

^65. S., interviewed by Marie Fritzová, Israel, April 11, 2022; E., interviewed by Marie Fritzová, Israel, March 28, 2022.

^66. El., V., L., and Mr., according to their responses to a verified qualitative questionnaire, May 2022.

^67. Except El., who proclaimed that, for her, the pandemic finished during the winter semester of 2021 when the university had already opened. These statements were made in response to a verified qualitative questionnaire, May 2022.

^68. N., Y., and My. (who actually marked 2020 as the end of the pandemic), according to their responses to a verified qualitative questionnaire, May 2022.

^69. B., T., and Ek., according to their responses to a verified qualitative questionnaire, May 2022.

^70. Sophie Lebel et al., “Health Anxiety and Illness-Related Fears across Diverse Chronic Illnesses: A Systematic Review on Conceptualization, Measurement, Prevalence, Course, and Correlates,” PLoS ONE 15, no. 7 (2020): 2; Daniel M. LeBouthillier et al., “Do People with and without Medical Conditions Respond Similarly to the Short Health Anxiety Inventory? An Assessment of Differential Item Functioning Using Item Response Theory,” Journal of Psychosomatic Research 78, no. 4 (2015): 384–90.

^71. “Illness Anxiety Disorder,” Diseases and Conditions, Mayo Clinic, April 19, 2021, https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/illness-anxiety-disorder/symptoms-causes/syc-20373782.

^72. Ma., interviewed by Marie Fritzová (online), April 18, 2022.

^73. My. interview, March 31, 2022.

^74. T. interview, April 7, 2022.

^75. Appeared in the following narrators’ interviews: T., D., N., B., Al., El., Mr. M. was most worried about her mom because she said she had no one else in the world.

^76. Appeared in the following narrators’ interviews: G., E., Mr., L.

^77. J. Daniel Schubert and Margaret Murphy, “The Struggle to Breathe: Living at Life Expectancy with Cystic Fibrosis,” Oral History Review 32, no. 1 (2005): 37–38.

^78. Schubert and Murphy, “The Struggle to Breathe,” 39. During pandemic time, we can see another pattern of storytelling: struggle with the unknown. There are also stories about helplessness that doctors describe during the first and second waves of coronavirus. See C. Ronald MacKenzie and Joy Jacobson, “From the Front Lines of COVID-19 at HSS: An Oral History,” supplement, HSS Journal 16, no. 1 (November 2020): 200–208; Renáta Bohuslavová, “Příběhy z První Linie: Pacienti se Nemohou Nadechnout. Jsou Vděční, Když je Uspíme,” CNN Prima News, last updated February 16, 2021, https://cnn.iprima.cz/pribehy-z-prvni-linie-pacienti-se-nemohou-nedechnout-jsou-vdecni-kdyz-je-uspime-19231.

^79. Schubert and Murphy, “The Struggle to Breathe,” 39–40; Marta Crivos, “Narrative and Experience: Illness in the Context of an Ethnographic Interview,” Oral History Review 29, no. 2 (2002): 13–15.

^80. Emma Ladds et al., “Persistent Symptoms after COVID-19: Qualitative Study of 114 ‘Long COVID’ Patients and Draft Quality Principles for Services,” BMC Health Services Research 20 (2020): 4, article 1144.

^81. Ma. interview, January 24, 2022.

^82. Ma. interview, January 24, 2022.; Ma. interview, April 18, 2022.

^83. In fact, only three narrators claim to have expected that the disease would cause a pandemic when they first learned of the discovery of the novel coronavirus. Appeared in the following narrators’ interviews: Al., Th., Y.

^84. P. interview, March 9, 2022.

^85. P. interview, March 9, 2022

^86. P. interview, March 9, 2022; P. interview, April 19, 2022.

^87. Appeared in the following narrators’ interviews: L., My., G.

^88. Portelli, “There’s Gonna Always Be a Line,” 24–39.

^89. L. interview, January 8, 2022.

^90. D. interview, April 11, 2022.

^91. N. interview, April 4, 2022.

^92. B. interview, April 6, 2022.

^93. L. interview, January 8, 2022.

^94. Ma. interview, January 24, 2022.

^95. S. interview, April 11, 2022; E. interview, March 28, 2022.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marie Fritzová

Marie Fritzová is a research assistant lecturer in the Department of History in the Faculty of Education at the University of West Bohemia in the Czech Republic. Her research focuses on the use of oral history and anthropology methods in teaching. For several years, she has been the executive editor of MEMO—Oral History Journal and codirector of the university’s Center for Oral History (SOHI). Recently, she has been dealing with the issue of COVID-19 and its effects on Czech society, especially in education. http://www.sohi.maweb.eu/en/. Email: [email protected]

Uzi Ben-Shalom

Uzi Ben-Shalom received his PhD from The Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Uzi is a military sociologist and psychologist and an active reservist in the IDF. Uzi is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ariel University. His research areas of interest are the military profession and civil-military relations in Israel. He is the chair of the Association of Civil-Military Studies in Israel. http://www.civil-military-studies.org.il . Email: [email protected]

Nehemia Stern

Nehemia Stern is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ariel University of Samaria in Israel. His research primarily focuses on the various aspects of everyday military life, including religion, social media, and heroism. In addition, he has published on contemporary religious Zionism in Israel and on the history of anthropological thought. His current writing projects focus on the experience of temporality within reserve military service, as well as the relationship between “gun culture” and shifting understandings of the “warrior ethos” within the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Email: [email protected]