“Sometimes a Kitchen, Sometimes a Zoom Call”

During the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, two community archives—After Violence Project (AVP) and South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA)—shifted their oral history programs online. Both organizations wanted to know if narrators felt differently about telling their stories via videoconferencing. To answer this question, we conducted research interviews with narrators after they shared their life stories with AVP or SAADA to assess their experiences. Our findings indicate that, despite a certain amount of technological ambivalence, narrators expressed that such software can create the conditions for a productive emotional distance between narrator and interviewer and a sense of virtual belonging. Despite these benefits, we urge archives to use some caution in adopting such technologies and critically evaluate their implications for privacy, ownership, and profit.