PhD Candidature During the Pandemic: Hansel and Gretel's Trip Through the Woods

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly influenced various educational systems on a global scale since 2020, and such impact will extend into the future. As a PhD student who started her candidature shortly after the outbreak of the pandemic, I reflect on my own experiences regarding how I struggled, persevered, and survived throughout the period. I do this through two illustrations from Hansel and Gretel's journey through the woods in the Brothers Grimm's story: (1) Dropping breadcrumbs—starting a PhD in lockdown: I felt a series of negative emotions and doubted my choice of PhD after starting the academia journey in social isolation. (2) Surviving at the gingerbread house—continuing PhD in pandemic: the unstable pandemic situation nationally and locally caused repeated lockdowns that led to a delay in my research project. Since the start of the pandemic, voluntary online networking socially and academically with other academia and the support and understanding from my supervisors were key to build my persistence. By joining volunteer organisations at the university, I benefited from social connections that supported my mental health and academic development while at the meantime helping other higher degree by research students. In doing so, I harvested academic accomplishments and developed friendships. Such reciprocal relationships in return have supported my academic identity and persistence in the PhD journey. These experiences contributed to the relocation of my original motives for undertaking my PhD research, the self-reassurance of my academic identity, and the reinforcement of my aspirations and expectations for the PhD journey. This chapter adopts the theoretical concepts from cultural-historical theory to analyse my psychological development in relation to the constantly changing social environment. Perezhivanie and the social situation of development are taken as a dyad of theoretical concepts to analyse my autoethnography. This chapter aims to encourage and empower people experiencing a similar situation. What matters is the inner attitude we hold toward the challenging environment, on which we act as agents to manage the conflict, just like Hansel and Gretel, managing to beat the witch and obtain treasures in the end. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022.

Mitigating the Challenges of Thesis Writing During the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Autoethnographic Reflection of Two Doctoral Students' Perezhivanie

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.

Children's perezhivaniya and agency during the COVID-19 pandemic: Narrative research from China.

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the lives of children across the world. To understand these changes, this study explores how 14 Chinese children aged 6 to 12 years old experienced and reacted to the pandemic since its first outbreak in 2020. Applying Vygotsky's conceptualizations of perezhivanie and agency, the author interprets the children's narrative accounts of their thinking and actions during the pandemic. According to the three-dimensional narrative analyses conducted, perezhivaniya commonalities among the participating children include limited physical movement, scarcity of peer interaction, compulsory online learning, reconstruction of family relationships, and noticeable self-growth. Further, the participating children manifested their agency as resisting, exploring, self-control, committing, and envisioning. Different perezhivaniya lead children to manifest different types of agency-a process wherein mediational means play pivotal roles. This study contributes to theoretical discussions of the dialectical relation between perezhivanie and human agency. Moreover, it has practical implications for how adults can support the emergence of children's agency through means of mediation in perezhivaniya.