Birthing Knowledge: First-Generation Students Managing Kin, University, and Wellbeing

Abstract (English)

Five years ago, first generation college students (FGCS) entered an already unfamiliar US higher educational landscape that rapidly shifted course amid the chaos of the Covid-19 pandemic. The structural fallout of Covid threatened these students’ advancement through the educational pipeline, and thus their ability to create class mobility for their family members. Covid also turned the once-ordinary intimacies of students’ family lives, like the birth of new kin, into the realm of the extraordinary. Based on longitudinal journals and interviews with FGCS from around the US, we examine how some participants who wrestled with their responsibilities to ‘uplift’ their families through their individual educational attainment also faced new responsibilities to support new family members born during a time of crisis. We show how the conjoined vital conjunctures, of pregnancy/birth and higher education, intersect with the mutual production of well-being and new kinship roles. We also demonstrate how families’ shared experiences of the pandemic illuminated the intersubjective nature of both vital conjunctures and broader life projects, including the reproduction of generations and the building of generational mobility.