Which specific aspects of your experience with COVID will you focus on?

Sheila R. Tully

COVID Labor Archives Paper Guidelines I. Goals: Using ideas and themes from course materials, this assignment is designed to allow you to reflect upon and analyze an aspect of your lived experience during this pandemic. Your task is to demonstrate your ability to use the lens of gender to consider and discuss the impact of COVID on some aspect of your life. II. Format: Your final paper should be 6-8 pages, 12 pt. font, Times New Roman, double-spaced with 1-inch margins III. Guidelines: The Labor Archives and Research Center is collecting written narratives from ordinary people who are living through the coronavirus pandemic. These stories will be very valuable for future researchers investigating the wide-ranging impacts of the pandemic on working people, students, frontline workers etc. Please review the link: https://sfsu.libwizard.com/f/laborarchivescovid19 Topic/Focus: First, choose a topic that is meaningful to you. Because this is a relatively brief writing assignment, you will want to narrow the topic so that you can develop your ideas. For ex. if you are interested in the impact of COVID on your education, you would want to narrow and focus this further. You might decide to limit your discussion to the technology inequities that make Zoom meetings impossible for some students. If you lost your job or have had to take on additional hours at your job to help your family, you could explore the economic suffering that the pandemic has caused. What Is Your Purpose? If you want to educate about a little known or acknowledged impact, you will want to include specific information that may require some additional research. If, on the other hand, you want to describe the personal impact of an issue on your community, friends, family and/or you, you will want to frame the personal in a social context that may require additional sources. However, your content in this case may be more reflective and elicit an emotional response. Description and Analysis: You will want to include rich description but also analysis. Your descriptive writing should paint a picture with words. Your analysis is the “so what?” of your experience. For ex. if you are focusing on your economic hardships due to COVID, your analysis likely would address the growing chasm between the 1% and the rest of us and perhaps the global wealth gaps as well. As always, if you have questions, please confer with me.