Hello, we are Aneri, Josh and Victoria. We are undergraduate students attending virtual and in-person college classes at Duke University during this difficult time of the COVID-19 pandemic. We are concerned with the way this global pandemic has affected the Durham community. Duke University is familiar to us as our university but simultaneously Duke university is a major employer of the city of Durham. As a wealthy institution, Duke University has been minimally affected by the global pandemic in comparison to the way this pandemic has directly affected the lives of the people who work to maintain the University’s campus as well as those who live in the Durham community. 

The research questions that drives our ethnographic fieldwork are: 

What is Duke University’s impact in the Durham community during the COVID-19 pandemic, both positive and negative? 

How is the Durham community responding to COVID-19? 

We approached this research with different kinds of ethnographic methodologies such as conducting interviews with interlocutors in the Duke-Durham area, sending out follow-up surveys to our interlocutors, and conducting field notes in both the virtual and physical landscape of the Duke-Durham area.