Share Your Stories & Materials
The NYU Center for Disability Studies is documenting the experiences of disabled and chronically ill people during the COVID-19 pandemic. Disabled people, especially people of color and those living in nursing homes or other congregate housing, have been at greatest risk of infection and death from COVID-19. In building a publicly-accessible archive, we collaborate with community members to preserve memories, stories, artworks, and other materials in a range of accessible formats. We are also preserving conversations on social media, records of digital public meetings, and photographs of street art and actions that are otherwise ephemeral. Our goal is to chronicle not only vulnerabilities, but creative initiatives for survival under these new conditions that are structured by old inequalities.
We welcome oral histories and artifacts from anyone with a disability, defined broadly, to borrow from Patty Berne of Sins Invalid as including “people with physical impairments, people who identify as ‘sick’ or are chronically ill, ‘psych’ survivors and those who identify as ‘crazy,’ neurodiverse people, people with cognitive impairments, people who are a sensory minority.” In addition to the value such “archives of the present” will have for future disability activists, artists, documentarians, and scholars, our collection documents the influence of this unanticipated public health crisis on the everyday lives of disabled people, and how these changes endure over time, reshaping the body politic.
Share Your Stories and Materials
In addition to the ethnographic interviews and oral histories initiated by our team of faculty and graduate students, we are eager to be in dialogue with any members of the community who wish to have their experiences preserved. Our digital repository will be preserved and made accessible by the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, a part of NYU Special Collections, at New York University.
We invite you to share your experiences in one of the following ways:
If you would like to offer your own testimonial or narrative, you may do so in writing, audio, or video format using this form. You may use our questions to guide your responses or you may choose your own structure for telling your story. Due to our limited resources, this option is preferred and offers the most flexibility.
We are also collecting a range of digital artifacts: artworks; correspondence and social media threads; protest graphics and flyers; mutual aid information; photo and video documentation. If you would like to contribute an artifact to the Disability COVID Chronicles collection, please complete this donation form.
If you would like to be interviewed by a member of our group, please complete this request for interview form. We are happy to conduct interviews in the format of your choice, from e-mail to telephone to Google Meet to in-person (when safe). We can ensure anonymity for those who request it.
Please note: in order to upload files to our forms, you will need to sign in to a Google account. If you do not have one, or if you have access needs not met here or other difficulty using these forms, please feel free to contact us at disabilitycovidchronicles@nyu.edu to make alternate arrangements.