5.14. Memory of epidemics and pandemics

This research examines how collective memory of health activism in Rio de Janeiro's favelas shaped community responses during the COVID-19 pandemic. It analyzes how marginalized communities preserved and leveraged shared histories of illness, resilience, and injustice to develop innovative and politically powerful methods for navigating structural health inequalities; transforming past resistance into contemporary resilience. This study specifically traces how collective memory of grassroots health organizing took shape through analyzing digital archives of favela newspapers from the 1980s. These newspapers, written by and for favela residents, provide firsthand accounts of lived experiences and document the emergence of health activism. The article follows these histories into the contemporary era by examining COVID-19 response plans across three unique favela communities. These techniques helped them resist state neglect and protect vulnerable populations. It reveals that favela communities’ collective memory of past health struggles directly shaped their pandemic response in three key ways: the activation of mutual-aid networks rooted in 1980s organizing traditions, the deployment of community-based surveillance that countered mainstream narratives of disease spread, and the creation of alternative healthcare delivery models that filled the gaps left by state neglect. These memory-informed practices challenged exclusionary public health policies and demonstrated how communities positioned health activism as both a democratic practice and a survival strategy. This work furthers health equity and memory work scholarship by exposing how collective memory functions simultaneously as resistance and a survival tool in the situation of state abandonment. This study shows that community-preserved knowledge systems offer critical alternative frameworks for understanding healthcare equity. These findings have implications for community-centered public health policy across the Global South, revealing how the memory work of marginalized groups’ can challenge structural violence and build more equitable health systems.

This essay develops the notion of the “parasitic archive” by attending to three forms of digital archivism of the pandemic experience in China: a docufiction hybrid (An Unfinished Film, dir. Lou Ye, 2024), a YouTube video (The Voice of April, 2022), and my personal collection of newsreels (2020). Each critically repurposes publicly produced footage by individuals during lockdown, and preserved through private networks or alternative media infrastructures such as WeChat group chats, Douyin/TikTok, and YouTube. Inspired by recent scholarly formulations of “accidental archivism,” I further question to what extent such archivism exceeds the accidental and might more aptly be understood as “parasitic,” revealing its dual therapeutic and destructive nature. The archive’s medical affordances in China are long-standing: an 案, “case,” inductively animates dang’an 檔案, “archive.” While the archive promises future diagnostic reference for the collective, I ask: what does the “case” mean to the individual itself at the moment of documentation? The notion of accidental archivism, while shifting focus to media archives that are more contingently shaped outside official historiography, leaves underexplored the human agency, though not in a determinist sense, involved in this medium-specific and medico-cultural context. I argue that the public’s self-documentary impulses were driven less by an imperative to remember than by a need for self-care. Self-care, however, necessitates self-exposure. Thus, such archivism is parasitic not merely in its formal appropriation of collective materials, but also on an individual level: a self-parasitism between the physical and digital selves, through which one attempts to discern the self from a homogenous socio-historical reality. The tension, however, lies in its ethical cost: The individual’s destruction—personal vulnerability, political risk—is exchanged for psychological care, inviting a rethinking of care ethics at the intersection of archivism, mediation, and trauma memory.

This paper explores how communities remember and narrate large scale environmental health crises (EHC) – such as epidemics – through folklore, and what these collective memory practices can teach us about coping with contemporary and future crises. Drawing on the conceptual framework developed within the HERA CHANSE project “Mapping Environmental Health Crises – Public Understanding through Myths and Science” (shortly: CHRYSES), the study examines how such huge memory events prompt communities to reconfigure both their physical environments and their internal “maps” of danger and safety but also evoke related “memory booms” (Fridman, Gensburger 2023) and cycles. Analyzing qualitatively a large bulk of mythological legends and conducting exploratory comparisons with modern crisis responses, the research highlights how mental maps of EHC are a dynamic tool of communal orientation – functioning as reciprocal resources for practical crisis management and initiating broader (even intercultural and interreligious) cooperation. However, the material also uncovers recurring motifs of demonization, such as spatialized narratives of malicious human and non human illness spreaders, that reflect exclusionary tendencies and the fragility of democratic cohesion under stress. By leveraging the CHRYSES international myth database and, at the same time, being wary of simplistic “direct lessons” (Peckham 2016), the study identifies historical patterns in how such complex responses to crises are encoded in folklore, especially scrutinizing narrated triggers that are depicted as catalyzing cooperation even in contexts where mental maps typically do not overlap. These insights can instill knowledge exchange between myths, public understanding and official interventions for designing culturally sensitive and inclusive crisis communication strategies. References: Fridman, Orly & Gensburger, Sarah 2023. The COVID 19 Pandemic and Memory. Remembrance, commemoration, and archiving in crisis (Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies series). Palgrave Macmillan. Peckham, Robert 2016. Epidemics in Modern Asia. Cambridge University Press.

This paper examines the social construction of COVID-19 memory in Brazil through Inumeráveis (Innumerables), a collaborative memorial network dedicated to producing texts in honor of coronavirus victims. The project comprises more than 600 testimonies and was created by artists and journalists in May 2020, when then-President Jair Bolsonaro was downplaying the severity of the pandemic, discouraging mask use and social distancing, amid soaring death rates and political polarization. The analysis of fifty testimonies seeks to understand how and for what purposes this collective memory was constructed; which events were emphasized or silenced; who was remembered and how these narratives positioned subjects through notions of causality, responsibility, and justice. Developed on digital platforms, the memorial emerged within a broader process of deep mediatization that reshaped mnemonic practices—an effect intensified by the restriction of social interactions. Its creation represented a political act within a context in which the high mortality rates were framed as fatal inevitabilities rather than as the result of the (in)actions of a denialist far-right government. The initiative provided a form of ritualization for dying and offered a means of working through grief when funeral rites were prohibited. It also enabled the symbolic recognition of the deceased as victims. The memorial’s narrative structure—composed of brief stories about the everyday lives of individuals—mobilized a language of affection: love, friendship, gratitude, anguish, and loneliness, conveyed through an individualized lens. While the creation of the memorial is inherently political, its realization also reveals a form of political hollowing out: causalities are diffuse, with no explicit demands for justice or reparation in the face of an avoidable event.