Today, I presented at the Digital Transitions Cultural Heritage Roundtable event hosted by Pepperdine Libraries.
My internship advisor and I spoke over the intentionality in design for the special collections wing during the renovations of Payson Library and how it works with the newly added Digital Humanities class offered by the University.
This event will be the last event hosted by Pepperdine University for the coming months given the COVID-19 pandemic. I am shocked we were even allowed to continue it as scheduled.
I had planned to write this blog on my experience at this conference and how my presentation and others tied in loosely with our class discussions. But that did not seem like enough given the news emailed to Pepperdine’s student body yesterday morning.
We were told that all class would be remote starting next week and that those living on-campus would need to move out by Sunday.
With that being said, there was much talk today at the Roundtable during the networking sessions about the on-going global issue and the implications involved to workplaces, universities, and just life in general.
During one of the networking sessions, I ended up in a conversation with Anna Speth and Jeffrey Bowen about the impact of this situation on long-distance friendships and how it compared to their experience with long-distance friendships during the 2018 wildfires.
During the wildfires, it felt like the only people who could relate to us were the people within the Pepperdine community excluding those on the international campuses. They felt our pain but were not really there. Only a select few could really understand what we went through as a community and why it tightened so many relationships between students, faculty, and staff.
Anna, Jeffery, and I decided in this conversation that because the entire world has felt at least some of the implications from COVID-19 that we, as a collective human body, are able to experience a kind of global unity that could only happen in an extreme situation like this one.
I found myself relating this statement to discussions we had early on in our class over the idea of a nation and the physical borders surrounding it. To have a nation means to have something that deeply connects a collective body of people and allows them to create a bond so tight that they would be willing to die for it. Physical borders were a large part of our discussion on the nation since most of the larger imagined communities relate to countries and nation-states.
The COVID-19 pandemic, however, has no borders.
It has now crossed most of the physical borders between nations, leaving only a few places completely untouched. It has caused chaos in the stock market, on grocery store shelves, and for job security. It has taken away experiences that we will never get to relive – such as the last few weeks of senior year.
I think that because this virus has no borders, that we are able to feel connected with the entire world almost like we are joining in on an emergency imagined community.
I have found myself thinking about the students of the world in light of the recent change in my university’s class meetings. It is of some comfort to me to think about friends from high school whose universities also made the decision to continue with remote classes. We are over 1400 miles apart, but we are still having the same experience. Students around the world are facing similar situations and I now know exactly how they feel.
Since we feel connected and can related to people’s situations from across the world over COVID-19, we will be able to get through this pandemic together as the entire human population and not just as individual nations with physical borders.
The imagined community between our world’s nations over shared fears of COVID-19 will be what defeats the virus.
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