How to be a Student during Quarantine: Insights from Clarkson Students’ Diaries
The final seminar in the SARS-CoV-2 seminar series examines the effects of the pandemic on the student experience. Annegret Staiger, Associate Professor of Anthropology, led an Ethnography course in Spring 2020. As students’ various projects of studying student life on campus became impossible, the course shifted focus to observing themselves. Students began detailed journaling of their experiences through online and shared diaries.
The class then analyzed the journals on the basis of what they revealed about “online teaching,” “well being,” and “outside world”. While the sample is small, the journals provide rich details about what life under lock-down looks like from the students’ perspective: the challenge of studying without formal structure and the difficulty to stay motivated, the role of online entertainment, the changed sleeping patterns, and the adjustments of living with family rather than with fellow students on campus, in the institutional context of a residential college.
As an anthropologist, I have published on education, race (US), and prostitution (Germany); author of Learning Difference: Race and Masculinity in the Multiracial Metropolis (Stanford UP 2006), Love and Labor, Lust and Loathing – Inside Germany’s Legal Prostitution (forthcoming, Indiana UP 2021). I am teaching courses on sexuality, gender, the Americas, and on European Film.
Register Here: https://connect.clarkson.edu/register/july1-staiger