This workbook is a small contribution to recording some of [the] organised responses workers and different communities gave to the Covid19 pandemic. It also shares snapshots of various emotions people have been experiencing during this health crisis. These everyday thoughts and ideas were gathered as part of the contributions we received to the online Pandemic Notes survey.
The workbook is divided into three sections: Work, Community, and State responses to Covid19 and each section is accompanied by a set of questions and an activity to further help the discussion and analysis on these three themes.
We are hoping that this workbook will prove a valuable resource for future organising and be a useful or practical record to be used for the pandemics or social crises that will inevitably follow.
pandemic-notes.maydayrooms.org/workbook/
About the book:
Title: Pandemic Notes Workbook
Publisher: MayDay Rooms
Page count: 72
Contributors: Fani of MayDay Rooms and Chris of 56a Infoshop
About MayDay Rooms:
MayDay Rooms was established in 2013. It aims to safeguard histories and documents of radicalism and resistance by connecting them with contemporary struggle and protest and to develop new free forms of dissemination and collective self-education. The Mayday Rooms building contains an archive of historical material linked to radical history.
Alongside our material archives, we create and maintain digital archives and databases of radical history, with the hope that these traces of the past might freely be taken up and put to use in present struggles.
Our work proceeds from the conviction that social transformation can only happen when marginalised and oppressed groups can get to know – and tell – their own histories ‘from below’. This historical work is a collaborative process, drawing together activists and historians from different places and different times, in order to make common cause, sharing experiences and ideas.
Our archival holdings are focused on social movements, resistance campaigns, experimental culture, and the liberation of marginalised and oppressed groups 1960s to the present: they contain everything from recent feminist poetry to techno paraphernalia, from situationist magazines to histories of industrial change, from educational experiments to prison writing. These documents challenge the widespread assault on our collective memory and the tradition of the oppressed. We aim to counter narratives of political pessimism with living proof that many struggles continue.
As well as housing an archive, our building functions as an organising and educational space for activists, social movements, troublemakers, and radicals. We also run a full programme of events including film screenings, poetry readings, archiving workshops, historical talks, discussion and reading groups, and social nights.
maydayrooms.org
