Engaging with Doctoral Work during the Pandemic

Abstract

This article describes the acceleration toward digital conferencing that happened due to COVID-19 safety procedures as well as how one’s ancestral legacy of trauma could affect how one dealt with the arrival of the pandemic as a collective trauma. This paper describes the researcher’s experience in developing “embodied digital storytelling” as a post-phenomenological art-based research methodology as well as how the use of this methodology intertwined with the study of ancestral legacy and the arrival of a pandemic. The reader will follow the researcher’s experience in developing the methodology, finding her topic, and conducting her research during the pandemic. The article ends with an account of reclaiming a sense of belonging despite all the challenges discussed.