Abstract
How does this pandemic moment help us to think about the relationships between self and other, or between humans and the planet? How are people making sense of COVID-19 in their everyday lives, both as a local and intimate occurrence with microscopic properties, and a planetary-scale event with potentially massive outcomes? In this paper we describe our approach to a large-scale, still-ongoing experiment involving more than 150 people from 26 countries. Grounded in autoethnography practice and critical pedagogy, we offered 21 days of self guided prompts to for us and the other participants to explore their own lived experience. Our project illustrates the power of applying a feminist perspective and an ethic of care to engage in open ended collaboration during times of globally-felt trauma.
How does this pandemic moment help us to think about the relationships between self and other, or between humans and the planet? How are people making sense of COVID-19 in their everyday lives, both as a local and intimate occurrence with microscopic properties, and a planetary-scale event with potentially massive outcomes?
This special issue conveys a broad array of responses to these questions. While it began as a call for expressions of interest for a special issue of Qualitative Inquiry, it grew into a large-scale, still-ongoing experiment involving more than 150 people from 26 countries. The original goal was to use autoethnographic methods to consider how these relationships are characterized, understood, and being enacted in this pandemic, by paying attention to dynamics of scale—such as the microscopic-as-the-whole, or the whole as a way to make sense of the granular. Researchers with varying degrees of experience with qualitative methods and/or autoethnography started working with the research questions we had posed in our call, some independently, some in collaboration. They all engaged at some level with each other through both an email list and a Facebook group. As part of the Massive and Microscopic Sensemaking during times of COVID-19 project (hereafter Massive/Micro), many completed 3 weeks of responding to daily prompts, sent out to them as a “21 days of autoethnography” experiment. 1
This special issue therefore offers two things to the reader: first, each essay presents the granular or microscopic practices of everyday life and inquiry and connects it with the massive scales and macroscopic aspects of this moment in time. These pieces can be read as the results of a collaborative experiment whereby many people across lifespans, time zones, cultural backgrounds, geopolitics, and experiences came together to tackle these questions even as they were experiencing challenging and traumatic times.
Setting the Scene: Combine a Pandemic With Protests in Early 2020
As the world grapples with the fallout from the pandemic of 2020, people everywhere have struggled to deal with everyday challenges. This is a complicated and over-simplified statement: Many lives have been disrupted. Communities and norms are in a stage of upheaval and we can’t yet say what it will look like when this process slows down. But what we know from the process we went through with Massive/Micro—and particularly as the smaller group of contributors built their contributions to this special issue—is that we were able to shift from reflections on the self-in-the-pandemic to deeper investigations of the privileged-self-in-the-pandemic. This shift is expressed and explored in and across different levels of abstraction from the moments of lived experience, spiraling out and then back, from our individual reactions and responses to larger collective responses, patterns, systems, and infrastructures.
In this rare moment, the entire population of humans on the planet are brought to a consideration of one another, confronted with the same crisis in many forms. Amid the many traumatic everyday challenges of suddenly staying at home, for some there was also strong evidence of a renewal of old hobbies, finding pride or joy in small details of home-bound life, communicating in new ways with neighbors, maintaining personal or intimate relations through digital media. Those who studied social media couldn’t fail to be struck by the central role digital forms of communication were playing in everyday life, work, politics, and education. Of course, the experiences were not the same for everyone. There were obvious class differences that highlighted grave and life-threatening vulnerabilities against extreme privilege. Some people were well equipped to deal with isolation or social distancing, while others found it traumatizing, paralyzing, and exhausting. While some were able to work remotely from home, others suddenly lost their jobs. And for those in essential service industries, daily work life continued, but now among more perilous circumstances than ever. Thus, within a universally felt event, the experiences remained substantively, importantly different.
Still ongoing as we write this, this moment of global trauma is experienced in ways that can only be understood as localized and unique. As time passes, different moments emerge for each of us in different ways. Like any massive-scale global event, most notably natural disasters, there is a big shock and then many months or years of ripple effects.
Massive/Micro was born in the early days of this pandemic. Some of the articles in this collection start from those early moments back in the first 3 months of 2020. Through their involvement in the Massive/Micro project, these authors work their way through to a more heightened awareness of their own positionalities, recognizing systemic patterns, the difficulties of establishing new habits and modes of being, and ultimately expressing their own struggles with the degrees of reflexivity engendered by the pandemic. These include, for example, the focus on aging and privilege in Mark De Garmo’s and Annabelle Sreberny’s articles or on government interventions in quarantine practices in China and India, respectively, in Shiyu Zheng’s and Sucharita Sarkar’s articles. when we were experiencing the raw shock of the spread of the virus.
Here, in many lockdown situations, one might recall the deluge of information about the virus; the charts, the passing of blame, the inconsistent advice about how the virus was transmitted, and how we could protect ourselves and our loved ones against it.
These early moments in the timeline of the pandemic seemed to highlight matters of scale. We conceptualized it as a planetary, global pandemic, yet the virus itself is invisible to the naked eye. We can access precise data about numbers of people dying per day per capita per city per country, and at the same time, we have nothing but uncertainty and vagueness when it comes to information about how long the virus remains on surfaces, how far the virus travels through the air between people, how many weeks or months we need to shelter in place, how long countries will remain closed. In so many ways, the issue is massive and, at the same time, microscopic. These scales compete with each other as explanations for the ethnographic question: “what is going on here?” They compete for our attention. They are simultaneously dialogic, oppositional, chaotic/inchoate, both/and.
This movement between the macro/micro may be natural to all sensemaking, but it seemed shockingly salient in this particular combination of massive global trauma and constant changes to the very microscopic activities needed to get through the days. For this special issue of Qualitative Inquiry, we explore this juxtaposition as both a finding and a method. As a unique contribution to multiple academic conversations in response to this global crisis, all authors focused on three questions together:
In these times, how are we making sense of the Self, the Other, and the World?
How is COVID-19 helping us think about the relationships between humans, machines, and the planet?
Through this pandemic, how might we understand the relation between massive and microscopic sensibilities and ways of knowing?
These are questions of human experience, certainly, but also of how the relationships between humans, more than humans, technologies, and the planet are characterized, understood, enacted, and lived. What lessons can we learn from using the microscopic as the whole, or vice versa, how can we use the whole as a way to make sense of the granular?
An autoethnographic lens encourages us to perform meaning from and through our bodies, situated daily routines, and relations with embedded, embodied, and everywhere digital technologies. This lens enables deep exploration and evocation of many of the complexities, profound paradoxes, fears, and hopes that characterize the entanglements that bring us together and also separate the planetary “us” in this moment. These pieces blur the boundaries between here and there, online and offline ways of being with. They “work the hyphens,” as Michelle Fine writes in 1994, enabling readers to feel the keenness of being in the between, living liminal lives, even if only for a moment. They reveal, often under the surface of the texts and images presented, deep undercurrents of trauma, hope, fractures, and possibilities. They shove a foot in the cracks of the fissure, pushing together to widen these gaps so we can see better what’s there and what we need to do to heal. As a whole, this special issue reflects and promotes particular ways of knowing central to the greater community of scholars using and experimenting with qualitative approaches.
It may seem obvious that there’s an urgent need to tell these stories of lived experience of COVID-19. This special issue enabled authors to dig in, find meaning, and write vivid, evocative, and challenging accounts. For those who heeded its call, Massive/Micro provided a much-needed community for finding expression for the voice screaming in the head, the grief raging through the body, the anxiety oozing out through the surface of the being. These sensations are evoked in different ways. Some contributions talk about the rituals of meditation and being with and in nature (the pieces by Annette Markham and by Anne Harris and Stacy Holman Jones, for example). Kathrine Thorndahl and Lasse Frandsen focus on disturbing micro interactions with family members and friends. Working with and through some of the 21 days of prompts, authors playfully/seriously sift powerful site- and time-specific reactions and deep processes. Tatiana Chemi offers a series of metaphors to meditate on her reactions to being in lockdown as a teacher. Wei Li offers a visual essay on the sensations of being a dancer stuck in a place where dancing is difficult. Esther Fitzpatrick uses her responses to several prompts to evoke the intra-actions between herself, the digital, the prompts, and other nonhuman participants in the natural environment. Peta Murray builds a wonderfully irreverent “Glossolalalararium Pandemiconium” in response to the prompts. Mary Elizabeth Luka reflects on her belated realization that video editing helped her process this challenging moment. Susana Tosca translates her feeling of being trapped in a repeating loop into imaginary videogame paratexts.
These efforts to address the “so what?” questions raised during the 21-day autoethnographic experience and thereby this special issue are situated within schools of thought where creative practice and critical autoethnography live (Boylorn & Orbe, 2016; Harris, 2017; Holman Jones, 2016; Holman Jones & Harris, 2018; Wyatt, 2018). We use the provocation of the pandemic to return attention to the interrelationship between the minutiae of everyday life and the ‘grand scheme of things’; how the global scale of this crisis can help us make sense of the micro. Massive/Micro is also an example of building research collectively, iteratively, and experimentally (Luka, 2018, 2020; Luka & Millette, 2018), through modes that fit well within a critical pedagogy framework for intervention (Markham, 2018, 2019), whereby researchers and scholar activists design and facilitate experiences for people to reflexively explore their own lives and limits. Some of the pedagogical impetus was even more grounded in classroom experience, as Luka, 2020 built the prompts into the curriculum for her summer course. This gave students an opportunity to use these prompts to process one of the most stressful events of their (our) lives while learning how a rigorous engagement with methods could help sift, sort, and analyze: to build narrative while doing theory.
The Overall Approach
The process was experimental and while not co-created in collaboration with all 170 initial participants, was certainly informed by their origin points, interests, and expressions of interest. We invited people to join us in “a sort of ‘21 day challenge’ format, often used for building a yoga or meditation practice” (for the CFP, see Markham & Harris, 2020). We emphasized that people “don’t need to be an autoethnographic expert to participate.” If accepted, participants would join a process to “workshop our ideas into an autoethnographic approach and subsequently, into articles.” We called it something of a cross between a set of mini master classes on auto ethnography and a writing club, with the outcome being a collection of pieces that have been nurtured in and with the group, eventually co-creating a special issue of a journal.
As is the case with research approaches that take an interventionist trajectory, the methodology for this study required continuous adjustments that must be attended to in the practice of intervention. In any arts-based creative inquiry involving large groups of collaborators, “method” is never just a set of tools and techniques, but an explanation, often retrospective, of how one’s methods were continually adjusted to fit the research questions, the contingencies of the context, or the overall goal.
Intended as a small collaboration among perhaps a dozen artists, activists, and digital media researchers, the call resulted in more than 150 expressions of interest from artists, scholars, and students in 27 countries. We decided to include everyone who had requested to be a part of the project. The design of the project needed to match the needs for participants distributed across multiple timezones, with varying degrees of experience in autoethnographic methods (some brought extensive expertise, others brought none), and with different preferences for communication. Almost immediately, then, the research design became experimental, not in the sense of traditional scientific experiments that can be repeated ad infinitum, but in the sense of becoming truly exploratory, testing the edges, pushing the forms. It could even be framed as a research design challenge rather than a method, per se, to foreground the necessity to create an adaptive and flexible research design to meet the rapidly changing needs and purpose of the project, which will be taken up in later sections of this article.
For us as editors, setting up this project therefore included the challenges of: choosing among social media platforms that offered different affordances and held political baggage for either the facilitators or the participants; framing the project in ways that would foster a safe and welcoming space for experimentation; and creating community engagement that could be somewhat or exclusively self-guided since participants were coming from so many time zones. Participants were also dealing with many complicating issues, such as home-schooling children, adapting to radical changes in their workplaces, and suffering from the deluge of trauma-inducing news about infections, crashing economies, shortages of hospital beds and curves that seemed impossible to flatten. So many of the pieces grapple with these situations. Several of the authors engage with parenting in a pandemic (contributions by Brook Bolander & Philippa Smith; Sun Young Lee; Pille Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt; Sucharita Sarkar; and Lisette Torres). Other authors reflect deeply on death, whether as a matter of social justice (for example, the contribution by Clair Irwin or by Lisette Torres) or with family members (for example, in two short essays by Sue Davis and Cathy Fowley, respectively).
Against this backdrop, the imperative to create a space for people to reflect on their lived experience seemed a vital ethical contribution. But it was a politically loaded and logistically complicated imperative. Such a precarious situation required a strong commitment to an ethic of care.
The Process: A 21-Day Self-Guided But Supported Collaboration
The group size, the timezones, and individual abilities to participate on a regular basis varied, and perhaps most importantly, the ongoing stress and anxiety around COVID-19 meant this was a vulnerable group. We needed to find a way for people to work collectively without feeling pressured to be online all the time, respond to others, or respond in a particular time frame.
We decided to create a “21-day autoethnography challenge.” This idea was based on common “challenge” formats for yoga, meditation, and diet challenges. The basic idea is that participants receive a daily prompt via social media or email to complete an activity within a 24-hour period. In our experiment, we sent out a daily prompt for 21 days, each a provocation to help participants think about the research questions we had posed (see background section of this article), or to practice what is involved in using autoethnography as a lens for sensemaking including several creative response options (drawing, dancing, media-making, etc.). We also included theoretics as prompts to help participants focus on a particular concept or theory about how the pandemic situation could be framed or interpreted.
Each prompt was preceded by an introduction reminding participants of our goal and research questions. It was followed by what we called our daily mantra (see Figure 1).
Screenshot of our daily mantra reminder of purpose during the 21 days of prompts.
We had planned all the prompts in advance, but considered each day whether or how we might need to adjust the next day’s prompt, depending on changing circumstances and general uncertainties in the world. In retrospect, we are glad we gave ourselves the opportunity to shift, as the emerging protests under the umbrella of Black Lives Matter shifted our attention about three quarters of the way through the 21 days of prompts. We were able to build this into our prompts, providing a much-needed outlet and site for participants to work through their feelings and responses to this important moment in global history. Some of the most powerful articles in this collection (specifically, Clair Irwin’s, Stephanie Shelton’s, and Lisette Torres’) ask us to think critically about the infrastructures that support global capitalism, systemic racism, and discrimination against people with disabilities. These pieces decisively lift the level of discussion in this collection from micro to massive, from considering historical oppressions to simultaneously imagining inclusive futures. We heard from many participants that this flexible and adaptive design was much appreciated, in that it helped them see that this project could be connected to important shifts in their newsfeeds.
At first, the prompts asked people to think about what was on the one hand changing and on the other hand constant about their immediate environment. For example, asked them to photograph, their three most familiar or intimate objects, and later, asked them to consider significant changes to their everyday routines at the microscopic level because of the pandemic. Later, we might have them revisit these images or changes, to build in reflexivity and affective aspects in their images or writing.
Below, we offer screenshots of a small selection of our prompts as they were posted to the Facebook group. These also were distributed on an email list, since some of the people involved did not use Facebook, either because of access issues or as a response to Facebook’s domination of the highly surveilled social media environment. The full list of prompts as well as how they appeared when posted with images can be found in Markham and Harris 2020b).
It is impossible to share all the interactions that emerged, but to give the reader a sense of the powerful effects of this project, we illustrate some of the vividness with which people were sharing and interacting on the Facebook group through several screenshots and closeup of posts, displayed in Figures 2–9.
Screenshot of one of the daily prompts posted on Facebook.
One of the images posted in response to Prompt #11 on Facebook.
Screenshot of a post on Facebook with a prompt.
Image and response to Prompt #7 posted on Facebook.
Response to prompt #12 posted on Facebook.
Snippet from a response to Prompt #1 by a participant, nearly 3 weeks after the prompt had been posted.
Screenshot of a response on Facebook, prompted by the shift to Black Lives Matters protests.
Screenshot from a response posted after the focus shifted to protests around Black Lives Matters.
Doing Research as Activism, With Care
The immediate and overwhelming level of interest was a powerful indicator of how much people really wanted to connect with others to try and make sense of this strange time of global trauma. It became important to meet the participants where they were, so to speak, and to be as adaptive and flexible as possible to create an experience that would be helpful and meaningful. Adaptive, in addition to iterative, research design is nothing new and is a hallmark of the blend of qualitative, quantitative, or hybrid approaches often labeled as emergent methods (Hesse-Biber & Leavy 2010). As we came into the project with expertise in these types of approaches, we were not surprised that we needed to shift not just the specific methods used but the overall research design to meet the needs of the situation.
However, in the midst of traumatic and swiftly changing circumstances surrounding first COVID-19, and later, Black Lives Matter protests, simply shifting research design was not adequate. Rather, it required rethinking the very purpose and goals of the project, being willing to remain uncertain to the outcomes, and to shift from a seemingly straightforward role of curator or editor, whereby we would give instructions to people about how they might produce a “piece” for publication, to a pedagogical role, whereby we were continuously testing different modes of interaction and tweaking our intervention based on the responses were getting. Particularly in the Americas, the sudden pivot from COVID-19 to Black Lives Matter protests amped up pressure for us to shift away from what was, after all, our privileged focus on the self, to consider larger issues of racism, systemic action, and social change. Methodologically, this entailed rapid shifts and required us to pay close attention to the mood of the posts and dynamic of interactions within the group, trusting that our expertise and instincts as skilled facilitators and teachers would help us see how to adjust the 21 prompts and moderate, amplify or leave the responses alone in the best ways possible as we went along. It also exemplifies Markham’s (2006, 2018) framework for enacting methods from a standpoint of the ethic of impact and future making. The sort of reflection and revision we notice in how we offered our prompts can also be seen in the efforts of the authors in this collection to continuously revise, unlearn, and rethink their own relationships with the self, society, and the pandemic on an incredibly tight publication timeline. Their efforts and achievements are remarkable.
Making Social Change Requires Academics to Take Risks
This year illuminates many things about the power of microscopic actions and decisions on the ground among everyday people to make impact on issues and systems that are massive, overpowering, or seemingly unchangeable. Among the massive global traumas, like systemic racism, climate change, and a deadly pandemic, this small project among 170 people may seem secondary. Still, and to use an overused phrase, the devil is in the details. Small acts of kindness, indifference, or evil can have effects far beyond their moment of enactment. It is precisely within these micro and often seemingly mundane details that future structures are born. In the past few months, we’ve witnessed how micro interactions between teachers and children and the caring diligence required to influence learning became immediately apparent as soon as parents were forced to homeschool their own children. Also, the micro aggressions of everyday racism, whether spoken aloud, uttered through the silence of consent, or buried in infrastructures and policies, are being dragged to the surface, where we can witness and critique them and work to change how things get done on these everyday levels. Our small projects matter. Indeed, at the same time as this 21-day autoethnographic project was underway, Rachel Cargle was running another iteration of her own 30-day unlearning racism challenge, a public intellectual opportunity to “do the work” that exploded in popularity on Instagram during the initial days of the Black Lives Matter protests (https://mailchi.mp/rachelcargle/dothework-course-all-30days).
Taking this to the level of qualitative inquiry practice, we find ourselves, as academics, at a critical moment. To ask ourselves again, why do we do research? Who is it for? How does it get performed and articulated? As designers and facilitators of this project, we learned a lot. Yet we were not interested in collecting information about how people experienced the pandemic, per se. Rather, the goal was to do whatever was necessary to help a group of interested persons become active, reflexive, and caring researchers of their own lived experience, first in the context of a pandemic and later, when there was a surge in desire in the group to address and begin the long and slow process to heal violent, historic, and systemic oppressions. In this regard, we see this project as an example of how an ethic of care can be a fraught positionality. It embraces that research will always have impact and rather than trying to avoid or minimize risk and consequences, which is the typical research ethics regulatory mode of thinking, we can use this tendency of social research methods to have an impact as a way to help facilitate rather than simply observe, social change. The value of the outcomes have been immeasurable.
So while ours may seem a small project within everything that is happening at the moment, it is in the proverbial flapping of a butterfly’s wings that global weather and ideological patterns can change, and therefore it matters. The year 2020 will go down in history for many reasons, including the remarkable ability of much of the planet to come together to stop a pandemic and start reparation efforts for marginalized groups of people. Of course, we are now living through setbacks, backlash, pushbacks, and continued spikes, waves, and lockdowns worldwide. Whether or not the effort of so many people on this planet to actually come together will enable us to make the changes necessary for a better planetary future remains an open-ended question. What is clear is that qualitative research can continue to move in activist directions, to do research that matters for the communities we work in and with, and to do what we can to spark and enact better ethical futures.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes
Author Biographies
