Disrupted Dreams: Understanding the Impact of Covid-19 on the Life Projects of First-Generation College Students and their Parents

This project makes use of the Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP) - an online journaling platform that Mason and Willen created and launched in May 2020 to chronicle and preserve first-hand experiences of the pandemic. We will examine the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the entwined life projects of first-generation college students and their parents. We ask: Has the Covid-19 pandemic impacted the content or trajectory of the life projects of first-generation college students and their parents, and if so, how? We will use a mixture of online journaling, semi-structured interviews, focus groups and the curation of an online photo exhibition to answer this question. Seed funds from Brown would allow Mason, Willen, Flores and Baines to build a long and lasting collaboration, would ensure the viability of the PJP platform through 2021, and would position our group well to procure extramural funds for this project. PJP currently has about 750 users and more than 6700 journal entries have already been submitted. By assisting our group in demonstrating that this platform can successfully be utilized to conduct virtual ethnographic research on a timely topic of importance during the pandemic, Brown can establish itself as a leader in virtual research methods in anthropology and education.