Abstract

The proposed project examines the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on everyday family life and learning in a diverse cross-section of US households. We probe how social, health and educational needs are being negotiated within each household, and how families view and interpret their experiences. Members of 40 households (20 in Los Angeles, and 20 across the United States) will respond to prompts in written, recorded, or multi-modal diaries (twice weekly for two months). Two rounds of interviews will be conducted with each household (in the fall of 2020 and spring of 2021). Both within and across households, we will analyze how social positioning along various axes of difference (gender, generation/age, social class/employment, local context, language, and immigration status) and access to different resources shape responses to and experiences with this crisis.

Principal Investigator

Marjorie Faulstich Orellana

Professor, School of Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles

Bio

Marjorie Faulstich Orellana is professor in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA, where she serves as associate director of the International Program on Migration. Her research centers on the experiences of immigrant youth in urban schools and communities, including as language and cultural brokers for their families. She is the author of Translating Childhoods: Immigrant Youth and Cultures (Rutgers University Press, 2009); Immigrant Children in Transcultural Spaces: Language, Learning and Love (Routledge, 2016); a 2019 coedited volume (with Inmaculada María García-Sánchez), Language and Cultural Processes in Communities and Schools: Bridging Learning for Students from Non-Dominant Groups (Routledge, 2019); and Mindful Ethnography: Mind, Heart, and Activity for Transformative Social Research (Routledge, 2019). She has also published in an interdisciplinary array of journals including American Anthropologist, Harvard Education Review, Social Problems, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, Reading Research Quarterly, and Linguistics in Education. She is a past president of the Council of Anthropology and Education and was a bilingual classroom teacher in Los Angeles from 1983 to 1993.