The dynamics of imagining the future in the face of crises: The case of students at the German-Jordanian University.

While universities have become a focus of public and academic interest in recent years (Pfaff-Czarnecka 2017), there is more quantitative than qualitative research when it comes to students' experiences at university (Heron 2020). For this reason, the planned dissertation takes a qualitative approach to explore students' experiences and, in particular, their ideas about the future. Students have to navigate the so-called "university parcours" (Pfaff-Czarnecka 2017) and in doing so they have to cope with crises and go through transitions and developments on an academic as well as on a personal level. One of these crises, according to Boin's (2009) concept of a transnational crisis, is the COVID-19 pandemic, which is omnipresent in both public and private discourse. This current crisis can be seen as the starting point for the research interest. The aim of the PhD project is to link the phenomenon of the crisis and the students' ideas about the future on the basis of the Corona crisis and to work out possible interdependencies. The focus is on the students of the German-Jordanian University (GJU) as a mobile and internationally oriented group of students who study transnationally.

Therefore, the research pursues a "multi-sited" ethnographic perspective to explore students' imagined futures in the face of crises. On the one hand, data will be obtained in the form of in-depth interviews, which will serve to reconstruct what was experienced as well as to present the individual students' visions of the future. On the other hand, a research stay at the GJU in Jordan will deepen the fieldwork. The qualitative research will take place over a longer period of time and the data collection will take place at several points in time in order to explore possible changes more comprehensively. I argue that conceptions of the future are dynamic and change as people cope with crises. These dynamics and crises of GJU students will be explored in more detail in the dissertation.