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"Beyond Words: Using Photovoice to Explore College Student Experiences of the COVID-19 Pandemic" Exhibit Opens

This exhibit explores how UNO undergraduate students returned back to campus following the remote learning of the pandemic. It uses photovoice — a participatory research approach that uses photo-journaling to communicate lived experiences that may be difficult to express in words alone; on display Feb. 15 to April 28.

  • published: 2023/01/30
a grey background with four pictures, one in each corner. The top left is two hands 'touching' through plexi-glass, the bottom left is a sidewalk with a shadow of two people walking, the top right is a sunset, and the bottom right is a floor sign with 6ft distancing instructions, and a person from the knee down standing on the sign with mask next to their shoe

Soon after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic in March 2020, universities across the globe shifted to remote education to stem the spread of the virus. This shift drastically changed the learning landscape, disrupting many students’ educational trajectories, social lives, economic supports, and mental health. As vaccinations became more available, many universities returned to face-to-face education in Fall 2021 after over a year of largely remote education. While research has documented undergraduate student experiences of earlier phases of the pandemic, we know little about how students experienced the return to in-person campus life.

This exhibit explores how undergraduate students at the University of Nebraska Omaha (UNO) lived through this transition using photovoice: a participatory research approach that uses photo-journaling to communicate lived experiences that may be difficult to express in words alone. During the project, a diverse group of nine undergraduate students participated in photovoice, making photographs, and writing accompanying journal entries about their everyday experiences of returning to campus life for four weeks in November 2021. The exhibit features a selection of student photo-journal entries to highlight their lives as students living through a pandemic that brought unprecedented challenges to undergraduate education.

"Beyond Words: Using Photovoice to Explore College Student Experiences of the COVID-19 Pandemic" opens on Wednesday, February 15 and runs through Friday, April 28, 2023. Join us for a reception from 4pm-6pm on Wednseday, February 15 at the gallery.

This project was led by UNO Medical Humanities faculty members Dr. Allison Schlosser and Dr. Peter Szto with the generous support of the UNO Medical Humanities Program, the Sociology & Anthropology Department, and the College of Arts & Sciences.