How American college students understand social resilience and navigate towards the future during covid and the movement for racial justice

The COVID-19 pandemic and crisis around racial injustice have generated compounded macro-level stressors for American society that negatively impact mental health and wellbeing. We contribute to understanding the impact of these crises by examining the process of developing social resilience, which we conceptualize as a temporally-embedded process of sense-making through which actors activate a sense of dignity, agency, and hope in the face of challenges to sustain wellbeing based on available resources. We interviewed 80 college students (aged 18–23) living in the American Northeast and Midwest before (September 2019–February 2020) and during (June–July 2020) the pandemic to analyze how they make sense of crises, respond to challenges, and project themselves into the future. We compare “privileged” upper-middle class youth who have families with more resources to buffer themselves against growing uncertainty, with “less privileged” youth from lower-middle and working class families. Efforts to achieve a sense of dignity, agency, and hope amidst widespread uncertainty illuminate opportunities and constraints in the process of building social resilience, which take different temporal forms across the two class groups given their experiences and resources.