The following projects document the impact that the pandemic had on everyday work, teaching, dissertation research, and graduate degree milestones. This includes the way people conducted their research, how work shifted during this time, and the transition to distance learning. Please follow the links below to find out more about each participant and their projects. The list is organized alphabetically.
MARÍA HEYACA| PH.D. PROGRAM IN SOCIOLOGY | CONTACT: MHEYACA@GRADCENTER.CUNY.EDU | EXPLORE MARIA’S PROJECT
Bio: María’s teaching experience began in Argentina, where she received a Fulbright Scholarship to study sociology at The New School. Her life gave a wonderful turn with her first CUNY appointment at John Jay College, where she has experienced incredibly empowering, transformative years. Having learned the immense social value of CUNY, she currently is a proud John Jay College and Lehman College teacher, and Ph.D. candidate at the Graduate Center. She has also been a committed social justice advocate for decades, with wide participation in human rights endeavors, social organizations, and grassroots campaigns in the US, Latin America, and Europe. She enjoys photography, and her most precious object of rejoicing have always been her students, whom she considers the real teachers.
Project description: What sense does it make to be overly concerned about oneself — to the point of neglecting others — when, for each person who tests positive for COVID-19, a greater collective risk arises, and for each person who tests negative, a collective victory exists? Faced with this unusual moment, I turned my syllabus for my globalization class (Summer 2020, Lehman College, SOC Dept.) into a learning proposal that focused on the existential truth that the COVID-19 pandemic has manifested: our human interdependence. The course involved students in the design and launching of a website that they had to build collectively in 21 days. The website SURVIVING COVID-19 is the form that our human interdependence in action took. It is also a precious archive that documents for future use the critical voices of Lehman students apprehending their social reality. SURVIVING COVID-19 offers an exquisite collection of historical and sociological essays that reveals CUNY students’ vast intellectual and creative powers, despite contexts of urgency and emergency. These essays clarify why the greatness of NYC is unimaginable without CUNY. SURVIVING COVID-19 is an invitation to critically explore what our city loses when CUNY students’ voices are blurred or neglected in the grand historical narrative of the pandemic. It is also an invitation to recognize how much our city has to gain when CUNY students’ voices are documented and amplified. SURVIVING COVID-19 also contains a tribute to Lehman student and sociologist Lenin Portillo.
MADELINE LAFUSE | PH.D. PROGRAM IN HISTORY | CONTACT: MLAFUSE@GRADCENTER.CUNY.EDU | EXPLORE MADELINE’S PROJECT
Bio: Madeline Lafuse is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She teaches American history at Lehman College. Her work examines how enslaved people poisoned their enslavers in nineteenth-century New Orleans. She approaches the topic from a cultural perspective and incorporates her interests in folklore, affect studies, and gender and sexuality studies.
Project description: I would like to share my experiences locating and renting safe workspaces for students so that others can replicate my successes and learn from my failures. I hope that it inspires compassionate collaboration among graduate students. However, it is also important to recognize the amount of underpaid labor the task requires, work which typically falls to women in ways not specific to the pandemic but that the pandemic certainly exacerbates. The workspace initiative also revealed the rigidity of Graduate Center bureaucracy and the need for more resources devoted to student organizing.
JESSICA LUGO | PH.D. PROGRAM IN ENGLISH | EXPLORE JESSICA’S PROJECT
Bio: Jessica Lugo is a Ph.D. Candidate in English at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her research includes the study of classical influences in Early Modern English Drama and the means by which mythology is routinely fractured in the service of an Elizabethan/Jacobean social agenda. Her teaching interests focus on advancing diversity and inclusion in higher education, as well as promoting methods through which the humanities can become more accessible to entry-level students. Her submission to this project speaks of a first-year composition course.
Project description: At the start of Spring 2020, I thought my biggest challenge would be managing a teaching load in tandem with undergoing treatment for breast cancer. The arrival of the Coronavirus just a few weeks later set that expectation fully on its head. In this reflection, I recount the transition from experiencing illness alone to navigating a full class of students that had a pandemic thrust upon them. Even considering early-term discussions about limitations and the possibility for disruption, we would need to band together once the world was different and our discussions of illness and social responsibility became more apropos than expected.
DAVID MONDA | PH.D. PROGRAM IN POLITICAL SCIENCE | DAVID MONDA’S LINKEDIN PROFILE | EXPLORE DAVID’S PROJECT
Bio: David Monda (he/him) teaches Political Science, American Government and International Affairs at the Department of Behavioral Sciences, York College-City University of New York. His doctoral training is situated at the intersection of Comparative Politics and International Relations with an emphasis on migration policy. His research interests center on transnational migrant communities, securitization of narratives around terrorism and comparative electoral politics. This research has included field work and research in Belize, South Africa, Brazil, Kenya and Argentina. Outside academia he enjoys scuba diving, playing soccer, chess and travel to exotic corners of the earth.
Project description: This reflection highlights the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on teaching for faculty and students. Because the pandemic moved all classes online, it highlights some of the disruptions this created. I reflect on the instructional dilemmas that faculty and students face during these challenging times. I also share this reflection to capture how the pandemic has changed teaching and research, while illustrating the need to have a human element of empathy in teaching during these tough times. Overall, I hope this article will add to the mosaic of lived experiences of faculty and students learning online during the pandemic.
For this reflection, I will focus on four areas that impacted faculty and student interaction during the COVID-19 shutdown. These are disruptions to learning, instructional dilemmas, COVID-19’s impact on my doctoral research and the need for empathy in teaching.
KAEGAN SPARKS | PH.D. PROGRAM IN ART HISTORY | EXPLORE KAEGAN’S PROJECT
Bio: Kaegan Sparks is a writer, curator, editor, and Ph.D. Candidate in Art History at The Graduate Center, CUNY, where her research centers on feminism, labor, and politics in 1970s American art. She has held or been awarded fellowships by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Mellon Foundation, the Whitney Independent Study Program, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, among other institutions. Her writing appears in Artforum, Art in America, Lux Magazine, Movement Research Performance Journal, Momus, and The Brooklyn Rail. In 2020 she co-founded Queens Care Collective, a mutual aid network based in Queens, New York.
Project description: My dissertation writing process has been delayed due to the closure of archives. However, the pandemic and its extended effects have helped to reframe my project’s core concerns in ways I could not have anticipated. Through a new substantial commitment to mutual aid work in my community (Queens, the epicenter of New York’s outbreak last spring), I am translating the implications of my dissertation topic—Marxist-feminist social reproduction theory—to an immediate, public context.
NATASHA TINIACOS | PH.D. IN LATIN AMERICAN, IBERIAN, AND LATINO CULTURES | CONTACT: NTINIACO@GRADCENTER.CUNY.EDU | EXPLORE NATASHA’S PROJECT
Bio: Natasha Tiniacos is a poet, educator, and researcher pursuing a Ph.D. in Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her research interests are Latin American queer disabilities, poetics, post-humanism and sound studies. She has an MA in Spanish (USC) and an MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish (NYU). She teaches advanced Spanish writing in the in Bronx Community College, and Hostos, and also conducts a poetry workshop in Spanish for seniors of the Washington Heights community. She is the author of the poetry books Mujer a fuego lento, and Historia privada de un etcétera.
Project description: A Spanish composition instructor reflects on the moment the pandemic started at the Bronx Community College, CUNY, describes their experience with a sudden transition to online instruction, and shares a writing prompt for students.
OLIVIA WOOD | PH.D. PROGRAM IN ENGLISH | CONTACT: OLIVIA-A-WOOD.COM OR TWITTER @BI_RHETORICS | EXPLORE OLIVIA’S PROJECT
Bio: Olivia is a third-year Ph.D. Student in English at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She teaches freshman composition at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and works as a digital pedagogy fellow for the OpenLab at City Tech.
Project description: Since Fall 2017, the third semester of my master’s program, I’ve been tracking my work hours each week. I am submitting charts with contextualizing information on how the pandemic affected my work, based on my records. While everybody has a feel for how their work has been impacted by the pandemic, my ongoing data tracking means I have a quantifiable picture of some aspects of my pandemic experience.
MIRIAM WOODRUFF | PH.D. PROGRAM IN CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY | CONTACT: MWOODRUFF@JJAY.CUNY.EDU | EXPLORE MIRIAM’S PROJECT
Bio: Miriam Woodruff is a student in the Clinical Psychology Ph.D. Program at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She works as a researcher at John Jay, a lecturer at City College teaching in the psychology department, and a psychology extern at the Baruch College Counseling Center. Miriam’s current research focuses on how school-based mental health programming improves outcomes for young people, and the impact culture and language have on the reporting and assessment of trauma. Her passion lies in using research to inform policy and system change that benefits marginalized communities.
Project description: As a doctoral student, my entire graduate career has been upended by the pandemic. My research was postponed. I failed my first exam in my entire educational career. I struggled with my mental health. I delayed graduation milestones. The common thread has been isolation and a lack of support. Distance learning was an experiment that challenged us to adapt, but the adaptation came at a cost. Some people fell through the cracks. I am calling educators to recognize the impact the pandemic has had on yourselves and your students and make our institutions more humane by implementing pandemic pedagogy.
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