The CUNY Distance Learning Archive (CDLA) was a group project developed at The Graduate Center, CUNY to resist and trouble the discourse of catastrophe around the shift to online learning caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. During the Spring 2020 semester, we documented the experiences of students, faculty, and staff across CUNY’s 25 campuses and archived the moment of crisis response from a critical approach to educational technology.

In 2021, from the thousands of items we collected, we created three public-facing digital exhibits (hosted on the CUNY Digital History Archive), focusing on three narrative threads that highlight some challenges common across the twenty-five CUNY campuses starting in March 2020. Using different forms of data from a wide range of sources, the CDLA offers a multi-perspective narrative that includes both the institutional and the lived experiences of multiple actors occupying different positionalities and identities.