Duke Academic Life
Hello! We are Chris, Maurice and Ryan. We are undergraduate students attending virtual and in-person college classes at Duke University during the difficult time of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our work for this project focuses on the impact of COVID-19 on Duke University’s academic life, broadly defined. As both a large institution of higher education and a leading research institution, Duke prides itself on cultivating a rich academic environment. It is thus important to investigate how Duke has adapted its signature academic environment amidst a global pandemic and how students and researchers have navigated this new terrain. Changing practices in classes, studying, laboratory work, and research all form aspects of our analysis.
The research questions driving our fieldwork are:
What are the new norms for students?
What are the challenges and opportunities presented by the changing circumstances?
What does the production and sharing of knowledge look like during a global pandemic?
How do COVID-era changes reveal the social and physical aspects of academic life?
Our methods included interviews with students and researchers at Duke. We also engaged in autoethnographic fieldwork, exploring our own academic experiences at Duke during COVID. Additionally, we collected photo and video representations of student and laboratory life from students and researchers!
Team
Chris Hassel
Chris is a Junior at Duke studying Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Cultural Anthropology. He is minoring in Economics.
For this collaborative ethnography, Chris focused on the experience of laboratory work at Duke during COVID. He conducted an interview with a research analyst in a life sciences laboratory at Duke. He also prompted a student research assistant to take photographs of their laboratory to capture different aspects of lab work during COVID. The photos served as the basis for a photo elicitation interview with the student research assistant.
Maurice MacIntyre
Maurice is a Junior at Duke studying Cultural Anthropology with a minor in Computer Science.
For this cultural anthropology project, Maurice will be exploring how Covid-19 has impacted Duke students academics as Covid protocols & safety measure has forced students to learn in an untraditional school setting. He will analyze online learning and out of classroom preparation for class. He conducted fieldwork through series of interviews, survey, and video enthrography. Through his work he aim to question how the pandemic reveal social and physical aspect of academic life.
Ryan McMutry
Ryan is a Senior at Duke studying Psychology and Cultural Anthropology.
For this collaborative ethnography, Ryan chose to explore Duke’s new online learning formats that have risen due to statewide social distancing restrictions. She specifically questions how Duke students have adapted to their new learning environments. What are the challenges or benefits born by these new formats? What new daily routines have formed? Are there any new approaches that students take to fulfilling academic endeavors? In addition to auto-ethnographic fieldwork, students share their experiences through individual interviews.
