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In February of 2020, everything around the world changed. By mid-March, the majority of the world was locked down. Teachers were called on to create a sense of "normalcy” for their students. And we tried. During that process, though, as a teacher, I started to truly question what I was teaching and—more importantly—HOW I was teaching. This reflective essay offers a critical interrogation of my own pedagogical choices during and because of the COVID-19 pandemic . . . and so many other "moments” that have led up to it. I contend that we need to look in the mirror and ask ourselves, "Are we doing this right?” The following offers my starting point.
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The chapter aims to analyze the COVID-19 pandemic from an autoethnography carried out in Cusco (Peru). This highlights the social differences and socioeconomic conditions that influence theway of living the pandemic and suffering its effects, which, in the Peruvian case, has more critically affected the most vulnerable populations. Thus, the privileged people can stay at home while the rest must go out to live/survive. The chapter invites us to think about a new social pact, more equitable and fairer, that divorces the pandemic-social inequality marriage, observed in different parts of the planet, particularly in the Americas. This is necessary to avoid future problems of equal or greater magnitude that tend to take their toll on vulnerable populations that often do not have the means to pay, or pay at the risk of their lives. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022, corrected publication 2022.
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The ongoing racialized violence against "Asian” communities—that was simultaneously illuminated and amplified during COVID-19—is not a geographically isolated phenomenon. Vis-a-vis the Atlanta Massacre of 2021 and other senseless attacks on "Asian” Americans stemming from white supremacist fears of the Yellow Peril, "Asian” Australians have likewise been, and continue to be, victims of everyday old and new racisms rooted in Orientalist discourses and concomitant fears of the invading Other. As microcosms of society, schools are germane for the analysis, confrontation, and transformation of such racialized injustices and so, as a means of intervening in these everyday inequities, this paper weaves an AsianCrit-informed autoethnography with palimpsestuous composite narratives drawn from semi-structured interviews in a broader project with other migrant "Asian” Australian teachers to chronicle personal and professional race-making practices in the face of racism before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, while also rethinking and re-stor(y)ing a–way toward more hopeful, inclusive futures in schools. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Cultural Studies/Critical Methodologies is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)
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This article considers the well-being outcomes of a community festival that was developed and staged in 2020, during the first lockdown associated with the coronavirus pandemic (hereafter the pandemic). It is an autoethnographic account that reports on well-being benefits as people engaged in a festival project together. Social aspects of well-being were enhanced through collaboration and connection, positivity, and community volunteering. Environmental aspects of well-being were enhanced by activities that reconceptualized and reworked the local environment and enabled learning and sharing. The festival created opportunities for play, laughter, and frivolity and developing a community story of sharing and coping. The conclusion identifies the learning from the process of creating a community festival in the midst of crises in the hope that others will be able to take some of these ideas forward in their own communities. © Copyright 2023 Cognizant, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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Online education made the digital divide visible during the COVID-19 pandemic, based on gender, economic class, locations, and different types of opportunities. Bangladeshi female varsity narratives on gender role stereotypes, economic conditions, household characteristics, family atmosphere, and online teaching strengthen the need for intersectional feminist insights. The study further examines online education potentials and pathways for more online education along intersectional lines. Qualitative methods help gauge how female university students shape their experiences with online education, and emphasize the epistemological importance of voice and women's perspectives for deeper understanding of their experiences. An ‘auto-ethnographic' approach undergirds the paper's analysis, elevating reflexive demonstrations and recommendations for more inclusive online education for female university student. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023.
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Long COVID is a post-viral illness where symptoms are still experienced more than three months after an infection of COVID 19. In line with a recent shift within HCI and research on self-tracking towards first-person methodologies, I present the results of an 18-month long autoethnographic study of using a Fitbit fitness tracker whilst having long COVID. In contrast to its designed intentions, I misused my Fitbit to do less in order to pace and manage my illness. My autoethnography illustrates three modes of using fitness tracking technologies to do less and points to the new design space of technologies for reducing, rather than increasing, activity in order to manage chronic illnesses where over-exertion would lead to a worsening of symptoms. I propose that these "pacing technologies"should acknowledge the interoceptive and fluctuating nature of the user's body and support user's decision-making when managing long-term illness and maintaining quality of life. © 2023 Owner/Author.
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The label "autoethnography” has been applied to a wide range of knowledge-producing practices, from what might be considered "normal” science to narrative-driven writing to performance. These debates highlight some of the most fundamental tensions about legitimate ways of knowing/ knowledge production in the contemporary world. Further, one strength of autoethnography as a method lies in situating personal experience within broader political, social, and cultural events, which can create new opportunities in academia for voices often silenced. With these elements of autoethnography in mind, and in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the authors founded an interdisciplinary autoethnography course cluster and lab at Oberlin College and Conservatory. In this essay, we describe the course cluster, lab, and successes and challenges of each. We also discuss the strategies and innovations of introducing undergraduate students to autoethnography. We hope that our model will be instructive for colleagues with similar goals at their institutions. Through the cross-course workshops and collaborative exercises of the autoethnography lab, our students had the opportunity to use autoethnography not just to analyze their communities but also to build a community of practice. © 2023 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
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With the release of generative text and image-based tools like Midjourney and ChatGPT in 2022, discussions about artificial intelligence (AI) and its impact on design, design education, and research have moved from the periphery to the forefront. These powerful tools, often open-access beta versions, have transformed speculative dialogue into a present reality. Their sophisticated and intuitive user interfaces facilitate the speedy and proficient generation of text, and image-based content, enabling designers, educators, and learners to simultaneously discover the dangers and possibilities of generative AI technologies. To explore the unique powers of both generative AI and human cognition, the author uses autoethnography, AI writing assistants, and generative AI technology to develop a story of practice. The narrative is informed by, and ultimately supports the scholarly literature that emphasizes the need for humans to take responsibility for the equitable and ethical use of AI. This includes initiating and guiding AI systems, critically evaluating their responses, and reformulating, editing, and verifying outputs to address factual inaccuracies, misleading information, or offensive and biased content.
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With the emergence of Covid-19 in South Africa in March 2020 and the subsequent lockdown restrictions, traditional universities looked to the University of South Africa for best practices regarding online teaching and learning. The Covid-19 lockdowns resulted in thousands of pre-service teachers in South African universities and colleges shifting and having to adapt at short notice to online learning. The outbreak caused students and lecturers to be thrust into online learning and teaching situations, with most of them having no prior training or preparation for the shift. For lecturers, the shift to online teaching represented monumental pedagogical and technical challenges, as they were expected to adopt and adapt to an online modality while rapidly learning to use various tools and maintaining the academic integrity of their institutions and modules. This chapter presents the autoethnographic experiences of four University of South Africa lecturers relating to teaching and administering learning and assessments for mathematics education modules. Within the qualitative research approach, we use a collaborative autoethnographic reflexivity approach to demonstrate the intersections between university society and self;the particular and the general;the personal and the politics of knowledge in the context of 4IR and the Covid-19 pandemic. Our experiences of online teaching and learning made us realise that the training of successful and effective mathematics teachers in online spaces during the pandemic is a complex and dynamic task, marked by issues of social justice, quality, equity, and academic inclusion, especially in a country as unequal as South Africa. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.
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As the COVID-19 pandemic has triggered strict restrictions for traveling and face-to-face meetings, the utilisation of digitally-mediated communication tools to generate interview data in qualitative research during the pandemic was almost inevitable. Employing autoethnography as a research method, this chapter aims to narrate, analyse, and interpret the author's personal experiences generating interview data for a qualitative research project via Zoom video-conferencing during the pandemic. It presents several unique benefits of the use of video-conferencing technology that the author found, as well as some possible challenges that the author anticipated when using the technology. In addition, it also elucidates some distinctive platform-specific features of Zoom video-conferencing that the author utilised to maintain high-quality and secured digital interactions. The information contained in this chapter is significant for researchers who are considering utilising video-conferencing technology, especially Zoom, to generate interview data in the future. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022.
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In March 2020, an official international declaration of a global pandemic resulted in worldwide uncertainty as our everyday experiences, including those within academia, were being hijacked by a contagion. Herein, I merge a philosophy of phenomenology with the methodology of autoethnography to elicit my personal story by recounting my academic experiences throughout the pandemic. This chapter describes how the first lockdown compelled a swift resignation from my revered, yet altered, academic position followed by an enrolment in PhD studies while simultaneously registering for Karate. Unexpectedly, training in Karate has proven to be a key ally in sculpting my academic identity, presenting as academic salvation during a time of professional crisis and global despondency. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022.
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In this ‘Tale from the Field', I reflect on the practice of ethnographic fieldwork with folk puppeteers over time, using my own experiences in a single fieldwork site at two points, 38 years apart. I describe my fieldwork as a graduate student in 1982 and as a professor towards the end of my career in 2020. I reflect on differences based on digital communication equipment and on my own changing positionality. My 2020 fieldwork was interrupted by the covid-19 confinement which adds a new wrinkle to contemporary participant observation.
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In this chapter, I explore my experience with psychological stress during the first year of my doctoral candidature that resulted from the intersection of the COVID-19 pandemic and global Black Lives Matter protests. As a qualitative researcher, I draw on my own autoethnographic vignettes (Ellis. The ethnographic I: A methodological novel about autoethnography. AltaMira Press, 2004) to provide an account of the personal challenges which may be generalizable to minoritised doctoral students during crisis situations. I use the Transactional Model of Stress and Coping (Lazarus and Folkman. Stress, appraisal and coping. Springer, 1984) to identify with and understand the stressors I faced as an insider—a Black, female doctoral student—and share the adaptive coping strategies that I used to be able to focus on my PhD. As a result, I prove the claim that the PhD became my saviour. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022.
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Completing a PhD is an isolating and arduous process, where doctoral students' wellbeing is impacted. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the pre-existing feelings of social isolation and lowered productivity resulting in further challenges due to the absence of established social support systems. Higher education is an area of particular interest, specifically in Victoria, Australia, where all students spent most of the years 2020 and 2021 in a lockdown. This chapter presents a reflective autoethnographic account of two doctoral students' experiences of writing their theses during the COVID-19 pandemic. We are two sociological researchers pursuing PhDs who experienced an extended COVID-19 lockdown while studying at Monash University's Faculty of Education in Victoria, Australia. Our chapter identifies how our socio-emotional and academic writing struggles were intertwined and how they affected the overall progress of our doctoral thesis. The emotional aspects included, but were not limited to, fear, anxiety, uncertainty, stress, and a lack of support, which will be the focus of this chapter. We use our accounts to share our coping strategies by acknowledging the effects of these emotional aspects. We achieved this through participating in collegiate virtual writing spaces via Zoom, creating a sense of accountability for writing by employing the Pomodoro technique. Furthermore, social interaction was a significant component of the Zoom sessions;we maintained our digital proximity while we were physically apart. The use of memes, presented an opportunity for us to socialise, joke, and reflect on the positives, thus creating a sense of self-efficacy during this challenging time. Ultimately, these sessions created a space to remind ourselves and each other of the passion behind our doctoral degrees and ascribe somewhat positive meaning to the thoughts and feelings related to the stressful and unexpected COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, we offer this chapter to support our fellow doctoral peers in these times of uncertainty across the globe. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022.
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The Ph.D. genre captures the complexity and plurality of practices generally confronting doctoral scholars, creating challenges and at times contributing to wellbeing concerns. The arrival of COVID-19 has exacerbated such challenges with its associated mandatory self-isolation and other imposed measures, leading to explicit and implicit impact on members of the doctoral community. This autoethnographic study draws upon the collective reflections of a group of researchers as they explored practical ways of fostering and supporting mental health and wellbeing within the doctoral community. Our study highlights three aspects for consideration: (a) a holistic understanding of doctoral wellbeing as key, (b) the interconnection between doctoral scholars' and staff members' well-being, and (c) communities serving as avenues to psychological wellness. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022.
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Undertaking a doctoral degree is a challenging but worthwhile endeavour where PhD students invest years of academic, physical, and emotional energy contributing to their specialist field. The emotional toll upon doctoral students' wellbeing has been highlighted in recent years. More recently, another issue has impacted PhD students—the COVID-19 pandemic. While emerging research has highlighted doctoral students' struggles and coping mechanisms, we offer our experience as two PhD students navigating our ways through the unknown terrain of doctoral study as a couple during a pandemic. With the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, we were forced to retreat from our allocated offices at the university and write together within the same vicinity at home during the sudden lockdown. During this time, we found that even though writing a thesis was stressful and our future was uncertain due to the pandemic, we found comfort and solace in each other. Writing together, in isolation, has brought us together. As we are in different disciplines—Medicine and Education, we also learnt how to approach our theses from different perspectives and became more resilient in our development as researchers. We discuss how our research backgrounds influenced the way we experienced academia and what we learnt from each other. We employ Vygotsky's term of perezhivanie to capture our emotional journey and academic development together to represent the unique environmental conditions experienced. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022.
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This chapter presents a collaborative autoethnography of our experiences as beginning researchers during the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020. Specifically, it explores how completing our doctoral preparation degrees during these unsettled times positively influenced the development of our academic identities. By drawing on transformative learning as a conceptual metaphor, we consider how we connected with our researcher voices online, reimagined our understanding of a virtual research community, and transformed the limitations imposed on our research as an impetus for creativity. We argue that just as we redefined our research and academic identities in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is important for academia as a whole to recognise and harness the potential for transformation as it responds to the new COVID-normal. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022.
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This book adopts collaborative autoethnography as its methodology, and presents the collective witnessing of experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic within the higher education sector. Through the presentation of staff and student experiences and what was learnt from them, the authors examine the global phenomenon that is the COVID-19 pandemic through the purposeful exploration of their own experiences. This book presents an overall argument about the state of higher education in the middle of the pandemic and highlights academic issues and region-specific challenges. The reflections presented in this book offer insights for other staff and students, as well as academic policy-makers, regarding the pandemic experiences of those within academia. It also offers practical suggestions as to how we as a global community can move forward post-pandemic. © The Editor(s)(if applicable)and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022.
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This section of the book synthesises authors' contributions by reflecting on the key themes identified in the various stories told within the chapters. It briefly describes the impact that marginalisation, parenthood, mental health, and virtual participation had on the formation of academic identity during the COVID-19 pandemic. The section ends with the editors' thoughts on what was achieved in this volume, in addition to the challenges that lie ahead. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022.
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The crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically changed many academic practices and situations that used to be taken for granted, leaving academia in a state of shock and chaos. As an individual who tried to meet new demands brought by the changing academic environment, I also experienced a sense of crisis. However, as I tried to meet those new demands, I developed new capabilities and employable skills. In this chapter, I will present selected accounts of my personal experiences in academia, both as a Ph.D. candidate and a higher education teacher during the pandemic. Cultural-historical and activity theory concepts, such as the concept of activity and the concept of crisis, are used to provide analytical insights into my experiences. The new insights helped me shift my perception of crises as something negative to opportunities and potential for development. It is argued that the concepts of activity and crisis can be useful conceptual tools to transform our way of perceiving crises and thus find new developmental conditions for ourselves in challenging situations. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022.