Book: Writing the Pandemic
Chapter: Distanced
Blurb:
Chapter 1 opens with the closure of a college campus as an unfamiliar COVID-19 virus threatens to spread among college students, often housed and taught in close quarters. Initially emptied, colleges and classrooms are transformed by distancing, quarantining, cleansing, and reconfiguring with recirculation fans, adaptable furnishings for spacing, sound projectors, and additional technologies to accommodate online and hybrid instructional deliveries. The primacy of place: campuses in communities, classrooms–particularly composition classrooms–in colleges, and the effects of students’ pivots to and from, off and on, are examined.