University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, USA, paul.adams@austin.utexas.edu
The COVID-19 pandemic created a profound challenge for universities and colleges. In the USA, the response to the viral outbreak within institutions of higher education was largely driven by individual decision-makers, including professors, department chairs, and deans. As a professor of geography, the author undertook auto-ethnography as both process and product, a way to learn about his competencies and coping strategies, his social interactions and responses, and his engagements with social power relations from a particular positionality. As a scholar with longstanding interest in communication media, the author focused on a trajectory from the campus to the home office, from place-based scholarship to the online contexts of «distance learning», from in-place communications to dependence on digital technologies. The study reveals resilience and adaptation but also incompleteness and fragility.
COVID-19; place; media; auto-ethnography; journaling; resilience
Download textFor citing: Adams, P.C. (2021). Everyday life reflection within the framework of COVID-19 pandemic: natural experiment in academia. Human being: Image and essence. Humanitarian aspects. Moscow: INION RAN. Vol. 2(46): Homo emoticus in the digital era, pp. 122-144. DOI: 10.31249/chel/2021.02.08