The session, ‘Pandemic Fieldwork: Doing Fieldwork during a Pandemic’, ‘discusses both novel and reworked methodological approaches for conducting, or attempting to conduct, archeological fieldwork during a global pandemic’. Margaret‘s paper, ‘Shifting Remembrance: On-Site and Digital Memorialization of Soviet Mass Repression in the Wake of COVID-19’, focuses on how the pandemic has changed encounters with and at a network of Moscow ‘dark heritage’ sites of Soviet repression, focusing on the places of violence themselves as well as the perception and dissemination of memories these sites are meant to preserve. Digital platforms and networks have already been used to disseminate historical, memorial, and political information that risk official censure in other media; thus, this paper also examines how the pandemic has changed stakeholder, activist, and government attitudes towards digital memorialization of Soviet repression and what these changes mean for the heritagization of mass repression.
