Crowd Coaxing and Citizen Storytelling in Archives of Crisis

Abstract

Cultural institutions are continually responding and adapting to the pandemic and climate change, from operational challenges in times of lockdown and natural disasters, to rapid response collecting practices that document these ‘unprecedented times’. As part of their response, some of these institutions—known as LAM (Libraries and Museums)— have harnessed participatory media such as Facebook and purpose-built digital sites that simultaneously collect, curate and often exhibit life narratives in public archives of crises. This practice can be described reductively as crowdsourcing; however, I conceptualise curators’ rapid response collecting efforts of Covid-19 and climate change life narratives on participatory media platforms as crowd coaxing, and those who respond to the crowd coax are citizen storytellers, who co-publish archives of crisis with the institution. Whilst this is not without ethical and structural challenges, the National Museum of Australia’s participatory website, ‘Momentous’ and associated Facebook public group pages: ‘Bridging the Distance: Sharing our Covid-19 pandemic experiences’ and ‘Fridge Door Fire Stories’ show how such crowd coaxing practices create archives of crisis populated by citizen storytellers who exert agency within the traditional power dynamics of institutional frameworks and national identity for a more diverse historical record.

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