Young University Students and Covid-19: an Eventful Perspective

Abstract

The objective of this research is to analyze how young students, who began their university life in times of Covid-19, have experienced the pandemic, nine months after its declaration. We look, in particular, to students enrolled in the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences (FCPyS) of the UNAM. For this, we resort to the category of event, understood as an establishing rupture at the level of temporality, intelligibility and experience. We follow a mixed methodology that consisted of applying a questionnaire to a representative sample of university students and conducting a focus group. We find that the most radical and profound breaks have occurred at the level of experience and particularly in the emotional dimension, with important traces in the field of sociality and sociability. But we also identify a series of learnings and skills developed by young people in the midst of the pandemic. Finally, unlike the visions that blame the youth for the spread of contagion, we find that, in general terms, young university students not only comply with official regulations —even more than their relatives—, but also link their following of the rules to their university status, despite not having set foot on campus yet.