Paper short abstract:

The First-Gen Pandemic Journaling Project digitally tracks Covid’s effects on students who are first in their families to attend university and mentors these students as collaborators. We explore our co-learning in digital methods, including building trust online and undoing research hierarchies.

Paper long abstract:

First-generation university students, the first in their families to attend higher education, took on additional responsibilities for their families and faced more disruptions to their learning than their continuing-generation peers during the Covid-19 pandemic. The First-Gen Pandemic Journaling Project examines the long-term effects of Covid-19 on the educational trajectories and caretaking practices of first-generation students across the US through almost entirely digital methods, including online journaling and zoom-based interviews. The project’s other main aim is to mentor cohorts of first-gen and/or minoritized student researchers as full collaborators in this digital anthropological research. Based on our co-learning with students, we argue that there are clear benefits to online methods. First, we find that reflexive implementation of digital methods can destabilize hierarchies of knowledge creation while creating robust and experience-near ethnographic insight. However, to achieve this aim, careful mentorship—across student and professor positionalities— is needed. The paper also attends to the challenges of online ethnography and methods instruction, including creating trust online and generating proximity in digital interviewing.