"I do wonder if the world will ever be the same after this": Students journaling the 2020 lockdown

The novel coronavirus surfaced in the United States during the spring of 2020 and quick-ly overwhelmed our world as we knew it, including those of us in the field of higher education. The present effort seeks to convey how the COVID-19 lockdown moment was experienced by Chicago-based college students enrolled in the authors’ course, Sur-veillance and Society, as the spring semester was interrupted by the abrupt imposition of “social distancing” and “shelter-in-place” policies. Analysis of how the COVID-19 was experienced by students is based on our reading of their weekly journals, which they were expected to maintain throughout the semester, but which acquired special poignancy during the pandemic. The journals are examined for expressions of social practices, senti-ments, and perspectives that shifted during the second half of the semester, when students were under lockdown and socially isolated. The journal entries capture a moment in history that students illuminate through their unique experience as actors making sense of the pandemic, fraught with altruistic fears of spreading the virus to loved ones, as well as the perspective of being a pupil in a surveillance studies course at a time when surveil-lance is seemingly evolving and multiplying. We reflect on the importance of integrating the academic voice with the personal voice by way of the student journal, ultimately arguing for its permanent position within social science pedagogy as both a gateway to autoethnography and a mechanism for cultivating in students a sense of ownership over the curricular materials they are asked to absorb in our classes.