Dr. Tizian Zumthurm (1.8.-30.11.2022)
Research project
A platform to collect COVID19 related photos, videos, stories and interviews from/with ordinary people living or working in Luxembourg

The COVID-19 pandemic is an event whose historic dimension is immediately obvious. Comparisons with the Spanish flu at the end of the First World War and the (uniquely Western) assessment that it is the greatest crisis since the Second World War are on everyone’s lips. Luxembourg’s state of emergency has led to unprecedented restrictions in our private and professional lives.

With the online platform #covidmemory, the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH) at the University of Luxembourg wants to offer all people living or working in Luxembourg the opportunity to share their experiences and preserve them for future generations. Anyone can upload photos, videos or texts to this open and free web-based platform, allowing us to document how the pandemic has changed our lives. How do we manage our family life with or without social distancing? How does teleworking change our professional lives? How do people and their environments cope with the disease? How does school function via digital education? What are our representations of pandemics and epidemics? How do we inform and educate ourselves? These are just some of the questions we aim to explore by collecting the experiences of those living and working in Luxembourg.

We are interested in a wide range of media: posters, warnings or orders, emails, newspaper and magazine articles, shopping lists and reports, but also personal photos, drawings, voice messages, songs and videos, and chats or posts from social media. We invite participants to share their memories on our platform to form part of a collection that will reflect the COVID-19 crisis in Luxembourg in all its dimensions.