Moving forward – staying put: social science postgraduates’ Covid-19 (im)mobilities

When the Covid-19 pandemic began, social science postgraduates (PGRs) in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland were instantaneously prevented from undertaking their carefully planned in-person fieldwork. The pandemic disrupted many PGRs’ temporalities, often resulting in both academic and existential immobility. During Covid-19, PGRs reacted in varying ways to the tensions of wanting to move forward with their PhD toward their future selves, yet often experienced staying put. This article explores the influences on several PGRs’ attempts to (re)gain control over their temporal (im)mobilities. It also analyses the impact of PGRs’ social and academic (im)mobilities resulting from Covid-19 on their (un)well-being. The research reflected on how Covid often interrupted PGRs’ hoped-for futures as their spatial immobilities became bound up with (im)mobilities related to their PhD. The article also directs attention to how ethnographic apprenticeship must encompass strategies to prepare PGRs for their PhD work as an aspect of their future-making.