Student experiences of Covid-19 lockdown - View the YouTube Video
Student Experiences of Lockdown - Video Interviews
‘Degrees of Isolation’ is the result of numerous interviews with students over the past two years. Here’s just one example of how we collected data to identify narrative themes for the comic.
James Walker
Since the first lockdown of 2020, we’ve been working on a comic about student experiences during lockdown. It quickly became apparent that there was a disconnect between media representations of students disobeying social distancing rules and what we were witnessing. Students were anxious, afraid, and fearful for their future. Yes, some were out partying, but others were scared to leave their accommodation.
Creating a comic that gave expression to these feelings seemed an obvious remedy. It had numerous advantages. Firstly, it helped to build communities as we put various students in touch with each other. Secondly, the comic provided a creative outlet for expression. Instead of just asking students how they felt and then going off and writing a paper, we wanted them to be involved in the creation of the comic so that they had ownership over their feelings. Too often academia fails to involve the people it purports to represent.
We did this in a variety of ways, but I’ll focus on one example for now. We contacted Catherine Adams, who runs a third year PR and Journalism course, and provided her students with a client brief to work on as part of their assessment. For this, they created a one-minute promotional video and interviewed a student during lockdown. These interviews were with students across the globe which immediately served the process of providing context to their own situation as well as helping create new friendships. For example, in Cyprus you were only allowed to leave the house during a set time and had to carry evidence of this permission with you. Otherwise, a fine would be imposed. At the time of writing, there are mass protests in Shanghai as a result of excessively strict lockdown measures. Understanding that we were all experiencing lockdown differently helped provide a degree of comfort to some of the students.
In terms of creativity, the interviews helped identify key themes students were experiencing during lockdown which then helped inform the narrative of the comic. Knowing that their research would have a tangible outlet rather than fulfilling an assessment brief encouraged some of them to explore issues they were particularly interested in, such as the abuse of power by security guards to force themselves into student accommodation.
Only time will reveal the full impact of Covid on our mental and physical health. But for now, these videos of students interviewing each other captures a period of history in which the world suddenly came to a grinding halt, and we all had to think differently about how we live.
Watching these interviews again, I’ve noticed lots of new details that I didn’t pick up on at the time, such as the nervousness of the Cypriot student and her inaccurate view that most students are asymptomatic. There is no scientific evidence that a student is asymptomatic but perhaps it was reassuring to think this during the pandemic because stories of younger people suffering side effects was rarely discussed. This is changing, though. The first findings from the world’s largest study on long covid, published by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), has found that up to one in seven children and young people who had COVID-19 may have symptoms linked to the virus 15 weeks later. Lead author Professor Sir Terence Stephenson, from UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health, said: ‘There is consistent evidence that some teenagers will have persisting symptoms after testing positive for SARS-CoV-2. Our study supports this evidence, with headaches and unusual tiredness the most common complaints.’
Only time will reveal the full impact of Covid on our mental and physical health. But for now, these videos of students interviewing each other captures a period of history in which the world suddenly came to a grinding halt, and we all had to think differently about how we live.
'Degrees of Isolation' is based on the experiences of University students who were interviewed between 2020 and 2022’.
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