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Paper short abstract:

Through the stories of Brazilian professors and students in 2020 and 2021, later transformed into comics, this work has a goal to reflect: How did the transformations imposed by the COVID-19 produce a particular mode of presence experienced by our interlocutors in their daily life?

Paper long abstract:

The Class Diary is a lecture tool for registering the daily routine and the presence of students. In 2020 and 2021 we investigated ethnographically the transformations conceived by the pandemic through the stories of those particularly affected in the scholarly context, teachers, and students. These stories were collected and illustrated as a diary that explores anthropologically how the new ways of "presence" in the pandemic were experienced.

All these stories present their particularities, but also belong to the collective memory, crossed by experiences and sensations interconnected. The fear of the present shares space with the hope of change in the future. We were interested in the transformations conceived within the teacher-student relations, at that moment exclusively online, that resulted in a new mode of "presence" of these subjects, and consequently, a new way of experiencing their senses and the establishment of relations.

Appropriating the notion of Class Diary for the register of daily presence, we explored these reports transforming them into illustrations to comprehend and express sensitively this new sense of "presence" experienced by our interlocutors. The Class Diary would be a registration of stories, feelings, and the relationships among these subjects. But, how to represent hope in the future, if the future was extremely uncertain to those facing that moment? Our challenge was to transform these stories into a comic book, without missing the point of view of our interlocutors and the miscellaneous senses experienced that crossed them, seeking ways of expressing it artistically as illustrations.