Down and out but undeterred: A narrative on utilizing the new mobilities paradigm for contraint-based methodological research as an international student during the Covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic led to lockdowns in Australia that inhibited the mobility of residents across the nation. While keeping many from leaving the country under a Covid Zero policy, the lockdowns also kept numerous international students from entering the country to commence their studies. Such disruption led to major constraints for a plethora of doctoral students and their graduate research projects. The constraints brought on by pandemic disruptions especially impacted every stage of the graduate research experience for aspiring ethnographers. Such challenges ranged from the stressful navigation of Covid restricted international travel, working around the university bureaucratic runaround in an ever-changing pandemic scenario, to discovering and utilizing the new mobilities paradigm to construct a doable thesis project under strict timelines. The reflective narrative presented here is a small contribution to the greater collection of stories about international graduate researchers making the most with very little during a constraint filled period of academic history.

Introduction

The Covid-19 pandemic created a plethora of constraints for individuals, communities, and whole nation-states the world over. The gargantuan number of anecdotes from those whom survived not only the spread of the disease but also the social conditions imposed upon them by societal institutions are without doubt as far ranging in variety and severity as the raindrops of a thunderstorm. Within the world of academia, particularly that of PhD studentships, Covid disruption added another layer to the everyday stressors of otherwise regular working people. Many tales of turmoil may appear from doctoral candidates describing their educational journey under the constraints of an unprecedented pandemic. Unlike the narratives produced by traditional students who studied within their own nation-state, this writing shares the unique perspective of a category of researcher too often left standing in the shadow of citizen scholars when policy and decision-making emphasized an ethnocentric divide: International PhD students starting their programs from abroad.

Utilizing the spirit of storytelling as so often emphasized in the craft of ethnography, this article reflects my own experience starting a doctoral program in Australia while being locked out of the country. Though my journey was only a drop in the great sea of doctoral studies survival tales during this time period in human history, it is my hope that this writing shall serve as a testimony to both the particularity and generality of such accounts of triumph over adversity; stories of minority members overcoming worldwide constraints to achieve life-changing feats should not get lost in the grand chronicle of our shared experiences during the intense restrictions of mobilities as a product of Covid-19 induced lockdowns.

The perspectives and insights shared here should not be interpreted as any sort of inflammatory piece toward any academic or governmental institution. Personally, I am tremendously grateful to have had the opportunity to achieve my lifelong dream of earning a PhD made possible by the support and acknowledgment of the University of Melbourne and Government of Australia. Rather, this story should be understood as a tale of triumph of a too often marginalized demographic under the various constraints brought on by the global pandemic.

My thesis project at the University of Melbourne originally aimed to explore the rise of automobile inhabitation since 2011 as evident with the global social media phenomenon known as #vanlife. Ideally, I sought to conduct a multi-sited ethnographic study on various hypermobile vanlife communities and subcultures around the world. However, the constraints on physical mobility worldwide in the form of international border closures and limited airline transit due to the Covid-19 pandemic would lead me to discover the “new mobilities paradigm” and focus my fieldwork within the United States.

Established by Sheller and Urry (2006), the new mobilities paradigm proposes to describe in detail the “context in which both sedentary and nomadic accounts of the social world operate, and it questions how that context is itself mobilized, or performed, through ongoing sociotechnical practices, of intermittently mobile material worlds,” (p. 212). By adding the new mobilities paradigm to my own theoretical toolkit—in the spirt and practice of making do with what is available—I was able to construct an innovative and practical research method that adds to the still ever-growing literature on forms of mobile ethnography, “which involve participation in patterns of movement while conducting ethnographic research,” (p. 217). Yet to best appreciate this pandemic constrained innovative research design that embraces various methods of mobilities research, we must first explore the personal narrative that led to its creation and implementation amidst chaos and uncertainty.

Mobile homelessness or #vanlife?

I lived in West Harlem when Covid-19 first broke out in New York City. After spending the prior year teaching at-risk Alaskan Native youths in rural Alaska, 700 miles away from the nearest city in −54 Celsius weather, I moved to New York City for the start of an intensive 1-year graduate degree at Columbia University with the hope it would lead me to a fully funded PhD program at a well-respected institution. I had spent the better part of my adult life navigating higher education as a first-generation university graduate with the long-term aspiration to acquire a doctoral degree in a field of study I was passionate about. Though my first semester at Columbia seemed like a dream come true for a son of the working-class, second semester turned into a nightmare of unimaginable scale.

Mass uncertainty in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic led to social isolations, campus closures, and a hard transition to Zoom conference calls in place of in-person classroom meetings. I will never forget the time I drove my minivan to Staten Island for a slice of pizza after weeks of stay-at-home orders. During my return to Manhattan in the early evening I looked into the rear-view mirror while driving up Park Avenue to see not one living being or automobile around. It was quite possibly the eeriest moment of my life in a quadrant of the city that would have normally been booming with life at that time of day. Strangely, it was in this moment while driving that I had a feeling in my gut that my chance of getting into a doctoral program after graduation was going to be disrupted by this growing global pandemic.

My intuition was correct. In May, during the last few weeks of my graduate program at Columbia, Princeton University was the first institution to announce they would not be taking on new PhD students due to the uncertainty of Covid-19 (Nietzel, 2020). With a lack of job opportunities in New York and PhD programs closing their doors to newcomers one-by-one, I packed up the minivan at the end of my apartment lease and drove to the Midwest to sleep on my father’s couch to see if society would return to normal. Unfortunately, it did not.

In early September a total of fifty US higher educational institutions had already announced they would also be suspending admissions for 1 year, not admitting new students in the fall of 2021 as “a response to the pandemic and economic turmoil” to assure funding for their current candidates (Zahneis, 2020). Realizing I had limited to no options in my home country, I began to search internationally for potential programs that would be a good fit and were still accepting applications for the upcoming year.

By a stroke of tremendously good luck, I found a thesis supervisor at the University of Melbourne in Australia who was enthusiastic about my project proposal on #vanlife cultures. I applied to join the PhD in Arts—Anthropology and Development Studies program with the intention of conducting an ethnographic research project with my own minivan in the United States. After years of trying to gain admission into a fully funded doctoral program my dream had finally come true from perseverance and recognition of my potential. Unfortunately, there were conditions added to my admissions offer that might have been a deterrent for others.

The scholarship I won to commence my doctoral studies in Australia included a yearly stipend, private medical insurance coverage, and a tuition waiver. However, acceptance of my offer was conditional to the fact I would not have access to any of my stipend or insurance benefits until I set foot into Australia. With a commencement date of March 2021 and a prediction that the borders would not open by that time, I agreed to the conditions as not to lose the opportunity to fulfill my lifelong goal even though they were unfair to say the least. To make this possible I also accepted an offer to teach as a full-time instructor at a community college in North Carolina. At this point the uncertainty of the pandemic was still ongoing and vaccination efforts were not available to the public yet. So, I started my doctoral journey in Australia online as a full-time student while also teaching full-time as an instructor of sociology to have pay and benefits inaccessible to me otherwise. Such constraints would continue for the first few months of my studies; I would teach full-time via Google Classroom during the day, then attend my mandatory first year seminars via Zoom in the late hours of the night due to the international time difference. As tiring as such a schedule might have been, this was the only path forward for me under the circumstances.

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic era, finding an apartment to rent in the United States was an unnecessarily painful process. For thousands of people during the pandemic it was exponentially more difficult to retain suitable housing with the economy coming to a standstill. The accommodation I acquired in North Carolina to weather the storm of the pandemic while I waited for the Australian border to open was month-to-month and severely overpriced. By May 2021 it looked very likely that I would be able to fly to Australia in September and continue my studies in person. I found myself at a cross-roads of risk and responsibility: I could either renew my contract at the community college I was teaching at along with the month-to-month apartment rental and resign as soon as I was able to fly (no doubt leaving that institution in a terrible bind to find a replacement mid semester), or I could take the more responsible path and not renew my teaching contract with the full gamble that the flights would carry on.

I took the responsible yet higher risk path, declining my teaching contract renewal only a few minutes after booking my tickets to fly in September. Not only would I have to wait 4 months for the departure date, but I would not have any income or health insurance at all in the meantime. Furthermore, my graduate classes were still meeting throughout the week and would require a reliable internet connection. With summer approaching and my body having received Covid-19 vaccinations as a frontline worker, it seemed most practical to simply drive around the country in my minivan to survive the pandemic until my exodus. At the end of the day, I was becoming the very subject I had hoped to research: A down-and-out vanlife nomad.

While some might consider my situation as another case of mobile homelessness, I chose to see it as a very minimalistic version of vanlife nomadism. Living off the small savings I had accrued from 8 months of teaching, I slowly traveled westward across the nation while sleeping in my minivan and the occasional inexpensive hotel when I needed internet access to attend my required seminar sessions online. I reveled in the sensation of adventure and exploration that is often associated with vanlife, visiting landscapes and monuments for the very first time. The pandemic had put much constraint on my personal, professional, and educational development to this point, but it also pushed me into a situation that allowed me to explore my home nation-state to a degree I had never done before.

Quite possibly the most positive experience during this stage of being a wandering vanlife nomad involved an opportunity to attend a vanlife gathering in California on my own personal time. This was a small 3 day gathering but the first time I had ever met anyone in the community of nomads. Almost immediately I was welcomed as a fellow vanlifer among the nearly two hundred various vehicle dwellers; vanlifers of various economic backgrounds attended and ranged from full-timer, part-timer, and weekend warrior. It was a wonderful experience that included live music, free food and drink, and lots of hugs and laughs among casual conversations. Although I was unable to do any official research during this time, it was a positive affirmation that this was a community I felt good about dedicating my time in studying as an aspiring ethnographer.

After traveling around the nation in my minivan for the early days of summer, I found myself in southern California in early July. I stayed most of the month at the home of an extended relative so I could finish up all the first-year requirements of my program because the thrills of the road were a bit to distracting. But after a few days of reliving the bricks-and-sticks lifestyle, I received terrible news in the form of an e-mail: My flight to Australia was cancelled.

The news hit me hard and fast. I was completely flabbergasted how the airline had cancelled my flight without any reason or justification. Something in my gut told me that that government would probably announce something in the next few days or so and the airlines were given first notice before consumers. Before long it was well explained that the Delta variant of Covid-19 was beginning to ravage the nation (Davey, 2021), resulting in the international borders being closed once again as a precaution. I had really found myself down and out, so where to go from here?

Moored in paradise: The waiting room to Australia

Vanlife in the continental United States treated me well during the summer, but my minimalist setup was not capable of withstanding the cold chill of the autumn and winter months. Furthermore, because the pandemic was still ongoing it was nearly impossible to stay with other friends and family due to fears of disease spread. With the cancellation of flights to Australia and absolutely no certainty as to when the borders would reopen, my only option was to moor myself in the paradise that was Hawaii, a place I called home for well over a decade before.

After parking my van in a midwestern garage for safe keeping, I flew to Hawaii and spent 6 months living in what I call an overpriced closet at $1,600 per month. Although I was glad to find a residential space for a short timeframe until things became clearer, the cost-of-living crisis and rent were depleting the little savings I possessed at a rapid rate.

Seven months into my doctoral program I still had not received any of my scholarship stipend payments. After barely scraping by financially to the point of not being able to afford rent or groceries due to the lack of promised resources being a severe constraint on my academic progress, I finally received the thousands of dollars owed to me along with a fortnightly stipend. The constraint of financial insecurity for everyday living was eventually resolved. Not too long after the backpay was received, international news stations announced the borders were opening in Australia. I leaped out of bed in the late hours of the night to purchase an overpriced ticket from Honolulu to Melbourne.

After spending the first year of my studies remotely while Melbourne endured six lockdowns totaling 262 days (Zhuang, 2021), I would finally see the city and campus in-person for the very first time. The constraint on mobility had been relieved, but would it be a definite condition with the lingering threat of a new Covid-19 wave? History of lockdowns would leave a traumatic imprint on many and the constraints of such would especially manifest itself in the research plans for PhD candidates of all disciplines.

Mobile ethnography: The new mobilities paradigm as a constraint-based methodology

I hit the ground running by beginning the formal ethics process shortly after arriving to Melbourne and trying to settle in during a rental market that was insanely overpriced (making me long for the days of rent-free vanlife). While the ethics process is truly an important feature to maintain the safety and well-being of researchers and subjects alike, my application went through three rounds of review for what seemed like a mix of reasonable and unreasonable justifications. Reasonably, questions were raised regarding the nature of the project and whether I would be doing a ride along method or even entering the vehicles of vanlifers in any way. The issue being the safety and privacy for all parties as entering a van for a vanlifer is like entering a private house of the everyday person. To which I simply realigned my ethnographic methods to refrain from entering the vehicles of my participants.

At one point in the review process, I interpreted an anti-American bias in the form of an absurd statement along the lines of, “Everybody you interview will have guns!” There is no denying that gun violence in the United States has been a serious problem for years, but to make such an overgeneralized assumption in academia was alarming. Furthermore, at the time I was applying for the ethics review, there were high travel warnings by the Australian government for people seeking to visit the United States due to gun violence. This also raised red flags with the ethics committee but since I am a US citizen why should I not be able to return to my home country to conduct research?

Although the ethics review process is important and did help me to refine my project design for the better, I lost precious time that could have been used to gather data at events in the field. Rather, the constraint of bureaucratic ritualism in the form of ethics review during the pandemic seemed to be more obstructive than productive because of the uncertainty and precarity of Covid-19. Still, from these constraints I would be able to reformulate my project to be as optimal as possible under the ongoing limitations.

The ethics process made it clear that graduate researchers should have a Plan B prepared in the event of another Covid shutdown of Australia. Since my project was originally designed to be a traditional ethnographic study, I could not fathom how one could possibly conduct fieldwork without entering the field itself. Especially challenging for my project would be the perimeters of the field; studying a group and community that may be constantly on the move is already in contrast to a traditional anthropological field study of a stationary village. Regardless of the where and when, “doing ethnography is establishing rapport, selecting informants, transcribing texts, taking genealogies, mapping fields, keeping a diary, and so on,” (Geertz, 1973, p. 6).

The primary plan of research, Plan A, was guided by the idea of casting a wide net in a deeply unexplored sea. Academically, the study of #vanlife cultures and communities that have developed since 2011 were minimally researched since I first proposed my thesis project in 2021. This was also evident in the massive gap in the literature, especially from an anthropological perspective. Guided by the ethnographic idea as put forth by Gertz (1973) that “ethnography is thick description,” (pp. 9–10), Plan A of my project saw great value in collecting high-quality data by living in a minivan among the nomad community to develop a thick description of this 21st century phenomenon.

How much time an ethnographer should spend in the field can be a contentious matter. Jeffrey and Troman (2004) note, “Earlier anthropologists researching rural cultures had an ideal of 12-months minimum in order to study the annual cycle of the growing season,” (p. 536). Kramer and Adams (2017) affirm this perspective as they explain:

Because a group and its norms often appear as unspoken assumptions, members may not be consciously aware of important values or may not explicitly discuss them regularly. As such, it may take long-term immersion in the group to notice key assumptions and values. Given this, most ethnographers spend at least 1 year conducting fieldwork. (pp. 3–4)

Thus, I designed my thesis project to be carried out over the course of 18 months in the sense of a traditional ethnography; data collection for Plan A sought to take two main courses of action: First, it seemed ideal to gage interest with nomads before flying from Australia to the USA to begin the fieldwork. I reached out to individuals on various vanlife networks via social media forums that included Instagram, Facebook, Tik Tok, YouTube, and Reddit. The aim was to search for self-described full-time vanlife nomads who might be interested in sharing their story by taking part in semi-structured interviews in person (in the field) or in casual discussion via passenger-seat ethnography such as conducted by Dawson (2015) in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where he would ride around with subjects for hours upon hours to gain a true sense of the various feelings and mobilities of their everyday lives through close observation and conversation.

Second, I sought to attend #vanlife gatherings and multiday festivals to establish connections and build rapport with potential participants and community leaders. Although ethnographic research quite often consists of casual participant-observation while living among the community being researched, I decided it would be important to memorize semi-structured interview questions to be used in organic conversations while engaging with vanlife nomads at these high energy events. Formal and informal vanlife gatherings happen every month throughout the United States; some events are free and sporadic while others range in price for entry that often pays for camping fees and the costs of services provided such as entertainment, toilets, and showers. Such annual events occur throughout the year in places such as the high desert of Oregon Outback, the low desert of rural Arizona, and sometimes just outside of urban sprawls such as San Diego, California. Attending these events was important in order to immerse oneself into the vanlife community because as Sheller and Urry (2006) note, “Mobilities especially involve occasioned, intermittent face-to-face conversations and meetings within certain places at certain moments that seem obligatory for the sustaining of families, friendship,” and various other forms of relationships (p. 217).

There are individuals and communities that are excluded from such meet-ups due to financial or social constraints. Researchers such as Giamarino (2022) describe this group as the vehicular homeless, a “relatively recent urban phenomenon, born out of necessity—individuals or families who lose their homes but manage to retain their vehicles for shelter. As the population experiencing homelessness has grown, so has the population of people living in vehicles,” (p. 2); a count in 2020 revealed numbers well over 18,000 of people living in vehicles throughout Los Angeles, California. Much like vanlife is a global phenomenon, so is the unfortunate result of automobile inhabitation from necessity in the face of housing security seen the world over. Thus, when first designing Plan A, I had hoped to cast a wide net on a global scale to see vanlife subcultures in places such as Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. However, a free-flowing approach to conducting this research was unfeasible due to the previous constraints and looming uncertainty of Covid.

After spending an entire year locked out of Australia, what would I do should I have been locked out again while conducting fieldwork in a different country? If it were the United States I could get by as a vanlifer on my own but if it were somewhere such as England or Canada, I would be in a terribly bad position without any work rights. Still, I had to consider the very real possibility that after I entered Australia a lockdown could occur, and I would be stuck from doing any in-person ethnographic fieldwork anywhere. So how best to prepare for such a scenario?

Working with the knowledge that two cohorts of my PhD candidate predecessors had their project mobility severely hindered due to the pandemic, Plan B for my project was created with the possibility in mind of another long Covid related lockdown in Australia. If international travel was completely suspended after I entered the nation, then how could I possibly produce a valid ethnographic account of a highly mobile community over 8,000 miles away in the United States? Perhaps not as ideal as actually being there, the video conferencing advancements of the 21st century could provide a very real interaction between myself and participants in the #vanlife community.

Classrooms and lecture halls across the world experienced a hard shift from in-person classroom meetings to teleconference modalities in what seemed like a rapid overnight transition. Stock prices soared for platforms such as Zoom making it a cultural norm often “synonymous with the concept of video hangouts, being used for casual happy hours, teaching in schools, and event,” (Paul, 2020). Universities that could afford to invest into the platform did so, with my institution heavily relying on the software to carry out class meetings during lockdown. Since the university also provided Zoom premium account access to all graduate researchers it was only logical to utilize such a tool as a main mode of data collection. Yet making and maintaining connections with #vanlife nomads while hypothetically stuck in lockdown would require more than a Zoom call alone.

Contemporary vanlife officially started in 2011 with hash tagged photos on the social media platform, Instagram (Rodriguez, 2023). Although the methods in which nomads regularly share their stories have expanded to platforms such as Youtube, TikTok, and Facebook, the primary social media network used to sustain community connections for full-time vanlife nomads in the United States is still Instagram. Taking this into consideration for Plan B, I decided if I could establish connections with participants who were regularly active in posting stories of their vanlife experience on Instagram, then it would allow me to engage in a mobile ethnography virtually, in line with what Sheller and Urry (2006) called “the keeping of ‘time-space diaries’, in which respondents record what they were doing and where, and how they moved during those periods,” as well as the method of cyber-research that “explore the imaginative and virtual mobilities of people via their websites,” (p. 218).

The methodological potential of virtual ethnography shined bright during the pandemic lockdowns. Whereas early “netnographers” such as Kozinets (2020) conducted immersive online ethnography as practical convenience, for graduate researchers during pandemic lockdowns and beyond it became a practical necessity to achieve their goals. In case the pandemic interfered with the potential to perform fieldwork, Plan B would include contacting self-described full-time vanlife nomads via social media networks such as Instagram, Facebook Groups, Tik Tok, YouTube, and Reddit to conduct semi-structured interviews via Zoom premium accounts. It would also include longitudinal observations of participants by the stories and imagery the post on their social media accounts over the course of 1 year. If netnography is a way to “study social media that maintains the complexities of its experiential and cultural qualities,” (p. 4), then surely it could be a highly beneficial approach in the case of the vanlife community.

The final product of my research design may be described as a well-informed constraint based mobile ethnography. The use of the word mobile in this case is multifaceted and in line with the methods of the new mobilities paradigm with the fact I would be living out of an automobile, moving frequently to interact with a highly mobile group of people, all the while using a mobile smartphone to observe and participate with vanlife nomads who volunteered for the project. Unfortunately, the amount of time I would spend in-person engaging in fieldwork would come down once again to financial constraints.

Financial and bureaucratic constraints were inescapable in the design and implementation of my research project. Although I was awarded a very generous grant from the university to apply toward my fieldwork, there were limitations on what the funds could be spent on at the time such as hotel accommodation or food. Furthermore, from the time I initially purchased such key items as airfare tickets, applied for the fieldwork grant, and eventually received the funds, the exchange rate between the Australian dollar and US dollar dropped so much over night that I lost money out of my own pocket. I also had to factor in the necessary price of maintaining a rental accommodation in Melbourne during on-going housing and cost-of-living crises. The various financial constraints made my time spent abroad in the field much more limited than I ideally would have seen fit, so my strategy was to use this short time to develop strong rapport with the community to then continue the research from afar back in Australia.

Once my ethics application was approved, after what seemed like unnecessary bureaucratic runaround, I began to collect data in the field over the course of 3 months. This included me sleeping in an automobile in urban landscapes as well as rural areas where official and unofficial vanlife gatherings would take place. This would include lots of driving across the country both solo and in convoys with fellow nomads to experience the feelings of these hypermobile subjects in their “atmosphere of place”; all the while I employed the use of photography and video capture through my own smart mobile phone and DSLR camera in the practice of “active development and performance of ‘memory’,” (Sheller and Urry, 2006, p. 218).

I spent many nights around campfires sharing stories of life on the road as if we were veterans of some long-forgotten war. By the time I left the field and returned to Australia, I had created a strong foundation to build upon with one hundred participants signing up for my study. For the subsequent 9 months I would watch the Instagram story feed daily of a great majority of vanlifers, direct messaging to communicate should I have follow-up questions. Often our communication was friendly banter as vanlifers do to keep morale high in the community. These 15 months of mobile smartphone participant-observation resulted in thousands of screenshots and screen recordings that would be used as ethnographic data to later write the story that is the vanlife experience in the 21st century.

Conclusion

Pandemic related constraints have guided and impeded the progress of graduate researchers worldwide. Though anecdotes will vary from campus to campus, there is no denying that the PhD cohorts of the pandemic years have persevered through quite possibly the most stressful shared experience as aspiring scholars imaginable. I have shared the greater narrative of my own doctoral journey—and the innovative research approach employed via methods of the new mobilities paradigm—since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and the disruptions along the way for three reasons.

First, as I briefly mentioned at the beginning of this writing, I believe it is important to capture the stories of graduate researchers who had the most constraints during the Covid-19 pandemic. Melbourne, having had some of the longest lockdowns following the national Covid Zero policy, was home to hundreds of doctoral candidates who were severely disrupted from the constraint of limited mobility. Not taking away from the trials of those locked in the country, this writing is meant to shine a light on the international students who were locked out of the country and had to persevere through unfair circumstances to maintain enrollment before entering the nation from abroad. Such a minority group should be represented in the literature and not lost in the cracks of time. I hope my small contribution inspires others to share their tales of triumph in the face of such contextual adversity.

Second, I chose to go into greater detail about my own backstory leading up to the research design itself to set a precedent in what we look for in storytelling of this epoch of history. In a time of unprecedented circumstances, the anthropologist in me finds it more valuable to learn more about the constraint filled journey each graduate researcher has undergone that eventually leads to the stage of methodological decision-making. The more I understand how they have struggled or have moments of being down and out like myself, the better I may be able to see the reasoning in their research design under constraints that go beyond the university setting alone. My application of the new mobilities paradigm and its associated methods is not isolated to this constraint-based research alone; it will stay in my methodological toolkit for the rest of my career as a researcher and ethnographic practitioner. It is a tool that was forged in the fires of the pandemic, and it will not rust for lack of use anytime soon.

Third, I shared this reflection of my own journey to raise awareness to the fact that pandemic related constraints still impacted the progress of various graduate researchers and faculty members alike even after the pandemic was officially declared over. At the time of my writing this reflection many universities and societal institutions have tried to just get on with life like nothing ever happened to severely disrupt our lives. Funding issues, post-traumatic health concerns (both physical and mental), and a general lack of empathy by those most privileged in university settings have been ever present to the point one must raise question whether we professional academics will ever truly recover from the experience of this pandemic.

For me the PhD journey in the era of Covid-19 has been a roller coaster ride of an experience. If I must choose a word to capture the essence of my story it would certainly be constraint. My restrictions on mobility, combined with the severe limitations of funding and time, along with an absence of certainty were all constraints created by the pandemic and severely disrupted my progress. Though down and out early on in my journey I was undeterred from pushing forward to produce a high-quality ethnographic thesis in an innovative way under the circumstances. If we hold true the old idea that chaos or uncertainty breeds creativity and innovation, then I look forward to seeing the publications that arise from the doctoral thesis projects of my international graduate research peers who struggled through a journey riddled with pandemic constraints; we truly have strived to create diamonds out of coal.