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Belonging in the Coronaverse: Time Enough?
Kate Fischer PhD, Malika Rakhmonova, Mike Tran
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Published by De Gruyter, Open Anthropological Research is an open-access, peer reviewed journal that provides a platform for discussing ideas from various anthropological disciplines, including social, cultural, linguistic and biological.
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Dr. Fischer, Mike, and Malika worked as a team to draft an article for this journal that addresses how the college student demographic is impacted by COVID-19. The article examines how the existing fast-paced, ticking-clock college culture in the United States clashes with the way that the pandemic has shifted our behavior and perspective of the future.
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Here are some short excerpts from that article that best capture that sentiment.
The coronavirus pandemic has both laid bare and obfuscated societal pressures regarding
running out of time.
Students walk nervously into their dorms during move-in with preconceived notions of how the next four years will unfold; what their visions lack in detail . . . they make up for in strength and pervasiveness.
College students on a campus such as ours find themselves in a doubly liminal position: they are children and adults, desperate to return to campus and deeply worried about . . . how normal it could possibly be in the era of COVID-19.
The fact that we do not know when this will end . . . only underscores the pressure to do everything now -- even though now is currently on hold.
I felt like part of this valuable time was stolen from me and could never be returned.
The nascent relationships I had cultivated with classmates died in the frost of COVID-19.
Perhaps running out of time is not about the end of a nostalgic, postcard-like college
experience after all. Perhaps it instead refers to the structural inequities that have produced these fault lines, to our failures to reckon with the past, to a nostalgia that is all too rosy and white-tinted.
All images on this page are credited to CU Boulder and CU Boulder Division of Student Affairs
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