Life in Quarantine: Witnessing Global Pandemic is an initiative sponsored by the Poetic Media Lab and the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis at Stanford University.
Public Engagement
Since the beginning of Life in Quarantine in March 2020, our goal has been to produce a free resource for anyone interested in understanding what life under COVID-19 has been like in the words of those who lived through it.
To achieve this goal, we we went straight to the source: we invited the community to share their stories, in their own voice and language.
The project started in March 2020 as a stripped down WordPress website. A newly designed site went live on August 8th, 2020. In subsequent months the project only grew, and was considered concluded on June 3rd, 2022.
Over the course of 27 months, our project engaged in various ways a global audience of thousands of people from all areas of civil society, including hundreds of high school, undergraduate and community college students; community college instructors, artists, writers, podcasters, open education resource (OER) leaders and many more.
On a number of occasions, we had the honor of being invited to speak about the project at conferences and public events.
Below you can find a record of these and other engagements, in chronological order:
Stanford Daily (Interview Article)
Sophia Speyser interviews Nelson Endebo, Ellis Schriefer and Farah Bazzi. Read here.
Published on August 25th, 2020.
Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (presentation)
This video presentation was originally made for an event showcasing various projects in our umbrella organization, the Poetic Media Lab.
Presented on September 22nd, 2020, as part of Stanford University’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis’s web seminar series.
Open Education Global (conference presentation)
Presented with our partner Dave Dillon on November 17th, 2020 at the OE Global 2020 Conference. Historical blurb below:
“Life in Quarantine: Witnessing Global Pandemic is a Digital Humanities initiative sponsored by the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) at Stanford University.
“Launched in March 2020 by three doctoral students, it is an open, online historical archive that documents how the COVID-19 pandemic is changing the lives of people from all walks of life around the globe.
“With the engagement of a diverse group of undergraduate students, the team created an archive that houses personal written accounts in a wide range of languages from various countries (currently, the submission form is offered in 13 languages).
“The website is designed as an open education resource for students, educators, governments, organizations, and businesses to promote cultural solidarity and global interconnectedness.
“Public participation is at the core of this project; the personal stories are published voluntarily and anonymously to protect the contributors’ privacy and encourage greater freedom of expression. Therefore, Life in Quarantine is a platform that crowdsources materials from the public that educators then use to produce pedagogical content.
“The broad scope of this project built on international collaboration permits educators to enrich their curriculum to more effectively illustrate the diversity of global experience in this historic moment.
“As Lindsey Gumb, a leading OER advocate, and many others have highlighted, the pandemic has further intensified an already existent, critical problem concerning students’ access to educational resources.
“This project recognizes these existent obstacles to student learning during this pandemic and has therefore paired up with the OER textbook, Blueprint for Success in College and Career, which won an OE Global award in 2019. This textbook now features a selection of stories from Life in Quarantine and this material will be available to over 20 higher education institutions and thousands of students across the United States and Canada each year.
“This partnership paves the way for further collaboration opportunities between Digital Humanities initiatives and the OER community.”
Arizona Open Education Regional Conference (keynote address)
Title: Building Global Competency and Empathy in Times of Crises: ‘Life in Quarantine’ as an OE Framework
Keynote address delivered on invitation from Maricopa County Community Colleges in Arizona.
Presented with our partner Dave Dillon on February 26th, 2021 at the 2021 Arizona Regional OER Conference. Historical blurb below:
“The COVID-19 pandemic caught the global community by surprise. As the pandemic continues, the disruptive and paralyzing nature of life in the age of social distancing remains front and center.
Life in Quarantine: Witnessing Global Pandemic was founded by three Stanford University doctoral students, Farah Bazzi, Ellis Schriefer, and Nelson Shuchmacher, to discover ways in which this global crisis might provide avenues for community building, leadership, global competency, and the cultivation of empathy.
The LiQ project has created an online platform that allows communities across the globe to share how the pandemic has changed their lives and reflect on its broader consequences. Although the project began as a global historical archive, relying on personal, written contributions, it transformed into an online hub for various creative collaborations addressing life during the pandemic.
One such collaboration that LiQ is most excited about is the partnership with professor and counselor Dave Dillon, and his OE textbook, Blueprint for Success in College and Career. This partnership has generated LiQ’s new initiative ‘Teaching Quarantine,’ an OE resource for educators throughout the United States (and potentially across the world) to share ways in which teachers can incorporate discussions about the pandemic in their classrooms.
In this keynote the founders of Life in Quarantine, alongside professor Dillon, will discuss the exciting evolution of the project. As the project nears its first anniversary, they will reflect together on LiQ’s successes and challenges as well as the meaning of leadership, initiative, and resilience in this difficult time, and share their story of how teachers and students have come together in ways commensurate with the challenge of our time.“
Arizona Open Education Regional Conference (workshop)
Workshop title: Crisis Pedagogy: How to teach Life in Quarantine
Workshop offered under contract with Maricopa County Community Colleges in Arizona. Recording not available.
Led with our partner Dave Dillon on February 26th, 2021 at the 2021 Arizona Regional OER Conference. Historical blurb below:
“Life in Quarantine founders, Farah Bazzi, Ellis Schriefer, and Nelson Shuchmacher, alongside Grossmont College professor and counselor Dave Dillon (creator of the OE textbook Blueprint for Success in College and Career), have found that thoughtfully approaching the pandemic in the classroom is as challenging as it is essential.
In order to assist educators experiencing similar challenges across disciplines, the LiQ project has created Teaching Quarantine, an OE initiative that provides the education community with resources and a platform to connect and collaborate.
In this workshop, the founders of LiQ and Dillon will briefly introduce the project and this new initiative and share the importance of integrating our current crisis into the classroom, giving specific examples from their own teaching.
The workshop is designed to provide participants with the opportunity to think critically about how the pandemic has affected their students and their pedagogy and to directly engage with fellow educators to grow this OE initiative. Likewise, this workshop will provide students and educators with information on the immense value of cultural competency and the internationalization of curriculum that will enhance students’ experiences both inside and outside the classroom and their ability to adapt to our ever globalizing world.
Attendees will gain exposure to ideas and hands-on examples of the pedagogical relevance of such themes and through group activities, they will collaborate, using the LiQ framework, to generate concrete responses appropriate for their students, disciplines, and institutions.
Moreover, participants will come away with clear opportunities to become involved in the OE community through collaboration, especially in the leadup to OE Week (March 1st-6th 2021). Lastly, this workshop aims to highlight how collectively adapting our pedagogical approaches to the current moment can not only aid instructors and educators across disciplines, but more importantly, it can provide support for students throughout their education.
The skills from this workshop center around “crisis pedagogy,” and they can help educators adapt to the present moment as well as to a future in which they may experience other crises that could similarly affect the education community.
Blueprint for Counseling Success (conference presentation)
Presentation title: Guiding Students Through Life in Quarantine An Open Partnership
Presentation delivered on May 14th, 2021 at the Blueprint for Counseling Success Conference, sponsored by the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges. Watch a recording of the presentation. Historical blurb below:
“In response to the pandemic, three graduate students at Stanford University began collecting, archiving, and sharing stories in which people around the world share the impact the virus had on their daily lives.
Life in Quarantine: Witnessing Global Pandemic (LiQ) has now turned into an open education initiative. Recently, the LiQ project launched their latest site section Teaching Quarantine, which addresses challenges educators are facing in the classroom through an open education platform that crowdsources pandemic-related pedagogical resources.
This presentation will describe the evolution of this project and show how counselors and instructors can use the website and Teaching Quarantine as a resource to help students navigate this challenging time.”
Celebrating Words in Quarantine (poetry reading event)
Event organized in collaboration with Life in Quarantine’s curator partner, award-winning poet Megha Sood, to celebrate the two years of the project. Over the course of two years, Words in Quarantine published 124 poets from all over the world.
To celebrate the end of the project on Jun 3rd, 2022, we invited 9 readers from our archive. In order, the readers are Natasha Huyhn, Usha Akella, Lucinda Clark, Gina Duran, David A. Romero, Matt Sedillo, Danny Shot, Barry Wallenstein and Megha Sood.
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Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA),
Stanford University
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