Student loneliness through the pandemic: How, why and where?

Case Study

This research project on student loneliness was co-authored by Professor Richard Phillips in the School of Geography and a group of undergraduate and postgraduate students. A link to the full article is here.

This article is a very emotive piece of work that explores the impact on students of the lockdowns and restrictions placed on all of their lives, and the lives of everyone else, during the COVID-19 pandemic. These restrictions, as well as COVID-19 itself, required unprecedented changes to the ways students lived and interacted with each other, as well as forcing them to shift their expectations of what student life would look like. The study found that this manifested itself in three disruptions: to relationships, to their ability to ‘put down roots’ and to their movement through life transitions.

The paper explored the physical and psychological spaces and objects that were significant to the students during this time, and why. It brought in students as co-researchers in this process in a variety of ways including data collection and analysis.

The Conversation

Hannah Raine, Research Assistant for the Connect & Reflect project, met for a short conversation with Will Haynes, one the of the student co-authors for this piece of work. The conversation served as an opportunity to reflect and discuss the meaning of this participatory work to him as a student, as well as a postgraduate researcher himself interested in the place and challenges of participatory research.

He carried out interviews with other students as well as a ‘self-interview’ to explore student experiences, which would then be physically written up into a diary that would be saved as an ‘object’ from this time.

A link to the interview is provided below. Musical Credit: Y'know by Miyamoto. Available here from Soundcloud: https://m.soundcloud.com/miyamoto2k2