Clarkson SARS-CoV-2 Webinar Series: How to be a Student during Quarantine

Insights from Clarkson Students’ Diaries

Presenter: Annegret Staiger, PhD
Student Presenters: Reagan O’ Donnell

This presentation is based on my Ethnography course in Spring 2020 and students’ journaling after we went to online education at the end of the Spring break. As their various projects of studying student life on campus became impossible, we shifted our focus to observing ourselves and began detailed journaling of our experiences through online and shared diaries.
We 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

Annegret Staiger, Associate Professor of Anthropology. 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.