Qualitative Inquiry

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.

As the COVID 19 pandemic spread globally, the experiences of loss were compounded by personal loss. Through this time of collective and individual grieving I set out to “traverse” the experience and figure my “perezhivanie” or lived emotional experience, through the materiality of mark making and entanglements with people, place, and art making. Art making framed by the “massive and microscopic” reflective prompts provided the opportunity for interventions into the medicalized and clinical world of hospitals and COVID 19, enacting beauty within a time of global, local, and personal grieving.

This autoethnographic poem tells of personal grief happening in a time of lockdown. It draws on the concept of chronotope, a discrete time and space unit, a parenthesis of sorts, which I have chosen to illustrate as a bubble. In our daily speech, we see bubbles as related to both time and space, now with the added meaning of close relationship of people, those who belong to the same COVID bubble. In this autoethnographic piece, relationships are mediated by technology which anchors our bubbles together, with multimodal links carrying affect and emotion.

In the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, I came to think about the role of my identity in my scholarship. Drawing on liminality as a conceptual apparatus, this autoethnography displays multiple layers of the self, that is, thresholding, passing, and daydreaming. Moving everyday encounters into parts of discourses, I consider how the self is always in full of uncertainty, wandering, rather than being fixed. I end with reflecting on the writing process: autoethnographic writing has been continual process to capture multiple liminal moments into a patchwork; it becomes possible by distancing the observing-self from the observed-self, however temporal those are.

The COVID-19 pandemic swept the world at the beginning of 2020. Countries launched into a state of emergency, involving lockdown and quarantine. When social distancing became the “new normal,” people were forced to stay in, working and communicating remotely at home. For many, an oppressive feeling of “being trapped” creates inertia, a strange lack of adequate energy to even move. Bodies no longer function in a social context. Participating in the Massive and Microscopic sense-making project (Markham & Harris) prompted me to engage in autoethnographic self-exploration of my own embodiment in relation to the pandemic, asking questions such as: How do we go about becoming reconnected again? How can we use movement and the body as a curriculum to learn and unlearn ourselves?

Embodied imagination is a learning theory that reverses the accepted Western “think first, then act” learning sequence though movement improvisation followed by reflection and reflective methods across verbal and nonverbal, including embodied-kinesthetic, modalities. Healing the Cartesian divide might have positive effects on world cultures and people across socioeconomic strata, especially urgent during the COVID-19 pandemic as multiple disruptions to daily life have quickly increased uncertainty and stress, compromising health and well-being, especially of traditionally marginalized excluded People of Color. Expanding the performative reflexive autoethnographic project through embodied imagination broadens and deepens this global, transcultural, transdisciplinary effort through the human body, traditionally not considered human thinking’s locus. Benefits across global societies include greater self-care, the ability to act effectively quickly in response to a world with exponentially increasing complexity, and awareness that creativity is a global communitarian human birthright, not a rarity relegated to exceptional people.

This is a critical autoethnography of my “plugging into hope” through engagement with the Massive_Micro project as I was, literally and simultaneously, plugging into my computer during the COVID-19 pandemic isolation. In this article, I demonstrate the art of #plugging into hope. Through drawing on a range of visual, poetic, and narrative data generated throughout this project, I write my story, creating an assemblage of plugging in moments with human and non-human. Adding to an ongoing conversation with art-making, writing, and my scholarly ghosts. Highlighting the significance of deliberately plugging into embodied intra-action with our world/s—connecting to hope.

By driving U.S. residents to shelter-in-place, COVID-19 forces many to experience restrictions similar to those experienced by people with disabilities. This autoethnographic essay uses my experiences as a White disabled woman to discuss the communal disabling experience of COVID-19. I use rationing insulin and my sorrow over the lives lost from insulin rationing and COVID-19 to critique the U.S. focus on consumerism and its obfuscation of Black Americans. This essay ends by calling us to use the pandemic’s disabling experience in empathizing and standing in solidarity with Black Americans, and fighting for racial justice.

If there is any throughline to COVID-19, it lies within a narrative of capriciousness. To explore the paradox of the pandemic as proliferation meets obliteration, I alternate randomization with redaction within a riotous essamblage combining essayistic principles of “prepositional thinking” with bricolage. Neologisms meet textracts of responses to the 21 prompts of the Massive and Micro experiment. Glossolalalararium Pandemiconium comes with a helping of “lala” in a froth of babble, doubt, rage, and whimsy. It is a textual grappling with the shock and awe of the everyday, girded by a notion of “meaningful irreverence” that underpins my current research.

This article discusses how different forms of autoethnographic production prompted by diverse forms of academic self-expression can lead to different types of knowing. Utilizing five examples from the Massive_Microscopic project, where participants responded to 21 different prompts inviting autoethnographic reflections about COVID-19 global pandemic, the article explores the responses from the perspective of alternative ways of knowing, reflecting on questions of motherhood, self-care, and performance in academia. Whether visual, rhythmic, or text produced from the perspective of things, the different modalities of the prompts allowed unexpected knowledge to emerge and supported deeper and more colorful reflections. Exploring the personal experience with the pandemic is expanded by the qualitative inquiry supported by different (self-)expression formats.

This essay has three autoethnographic, interconnected, temporal vignettes that narrate my lived pandemic experiences of mothering a teenage daughter, performing socially isolated housework, and teaching online classes. These personal experiences are located in specific Indian contexts through thick descriptions that accommodate more massive perspectives. Adapting Sarah Sharma’s concepts of power-chronography and temporal politics, I problematize my COVID-enforced slow time, and explore more deeply how my fraught COVID time experiences intersect with the multiple COVID times of others. I use this methodological format—autoethnography, thick description, and theorization—to make sense of my pandemic experiences at both microscopic and massive levels.

This article explores the micro- and macro-level implications of the dual global pandemics of COVID-19 and racism through a narrative structure based on Barad’s discussion of “timehops.” Weaving personal, national, and international stories, the article explores qualitative research’s responsibility and potential to offer new ways to respond to the entanglements of people, places, moments, materials, and these pandemics.

This reflective autoethnography uses writing, photos, and audio recordings to present my 14-day quarantine in times of COVID-19 from arriving in China, meeting my handler, developing relationships through online chats, to helping others out in a Chinese hotel. This article serves as a reference for people in quarantine to fight against the fear, frustration, and depression that can arise from being isolated. Experiencing friendliness during these struggles, especially some of the self-inspiration and encouragement that can be stimulated by friendliness, will support us to change the way we think, live, and deal with difficulties, not just now but in future.

In this article, we “write-to” time from an autoethnographic perspective. Working intra-actively via a dialogic play script form, we collaboratively wonder about time during our experiences of COVID-19 as it relates to a compression of offline into online spaces. Presenting conversations we’ve had together over email, WhatsApp, and Google docs, with the reviewers of this Special Issue, and with scholarship, we foreground three main questions: What does time mean? How has our sense of time changed? And what is the link between these meanings and changes and the relationship between online and offline spaces?

This article troubles touch as requiring embodied proximity, through an affective account of virtual touch during coronatime. Interested in doing academia differently, we started an online Barad readingwriting group from different locations. The coronatime void was not a vacuum, but a plenitude of possibilities for intimacy, pedagogy, learning, creativity, and adventure. Although physically apart, we met daily through Zoom, and we touched and were touched by each other and the texts we read. A montage of writing fragments and a collective artwork, based on the Massive_Micro project, highlight virtual touching. Undone, redone, and reconfigured, we became a diffractive human/nonhuman multiplicity.

My purpose is to investigate what happens to bodies/affects, arts-based education, entangled relationships, diffractive perspectives, and playful dramatizations during a pandemic crisis. The Covid-19 emergency was a tsunami that wiped away all my favored teaching tools. It is impossible I wrote to my study-leader when I had to adjust my creative teaching to digital frames. Still I did it, asking: what if? How did this experimentation transform my thinking, planning, and implementing teaching? The methodology I made use of is autoethnographic where data emerged by means of written or multimedia materials that were part of two collective writing projects.

This essay uses several of the prompts from the Massive::Microscopic experiment as a jumping off point for considering how affect theory and critical autoethnography offer us a framework for understanding, creating, and acting together in the time of COVID. Through stories of cloud-watching, mindfulness meditation, and other encounters with atmospheres and movements, we connect individual experiences of the pandemic to Buddhist understandings of a universal “we.” As a research practice committed to joining microscopic with macro lived experience, critical autoethnography offers a speculative method for collective reckoning with our infinitesimal selves in relation to the infinite of a pandemic.

Based on a collaborative endeavor, we present an autoethnographic textual collage of three fictionalized narrative accounts produced as a result of an amalgam of personal experiences encountered during the corona pandemic. The narrative accounts serve as illustrating examples of and critical reflections on how the pandemic and the increased use of digital technologies during the pandemic have affected the experience of reality and (trans)formed thinking and social relations alike. The crisis invites us to reflect on how the current confinement saturated with the ubiquitous presence and influence of digital technologies can be used as an occasion for large-scale reflections.

In this article, I explore how two research-creation projects helped me to process the stresses of the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown using a critical autoethnographic approach. Video editing weaves the two projects together, providing both a descriptive and abstract engagement with ideas about glitter as method and media making as a form of analysis. The article starts with Prompt #3 from the Massive Micro Sensemaking undertaking led by Annette Markham and Anne Harris in May and June, 2020, and is punctuated by the text and links to the videos produced by media artist Midi Onodera between April and July 2020.

The challenge of autoethnography is using my personal experience to explore broader social and political themes and to find a subjective voice to make sense of the impact of the Covid 19 lockdown. Using the optic of aging, I explore how I accommodated to quarantine life. Sitting and letting the world swirl around me in my house, I explore the altered physical and mental spaces in which I lived. Despite my own privileges, I have felt vulnerable and frightened but I have also felt angry and frustrated at the hubris and incompetence with which this crisis has been handled.

This critical autoethnography, informed by Critical Race Theory (CRT), intersectionality, and DisCrit, explores the lived experience of a disabled Latina mother-scholar during COVID-19. She uses meditation to think about macroscopic conceptions of independence and time, asking how COVID-19 has changed the way she relates to others and her scholarship. In the process of journaling and engaging in different evocative prompts, she has visceral responses to the death of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) Movement, and the suffering of Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) communities. The author realizes that contemplative methodologies should center collective care and mending to “let go” of White supremacy, ableism, and sexism.

On the basis of the author’s participation in the “Massive and Microscopic Sensemaking” autoethnographic experiment, this article suggests that researchers can use videogame rhetoric as a heuristic to think through the timelessness of the pandemic lockdown. The author used her autoethnographic field notes as background material to write a series of short fictional videogame narratives, in the methodological tradition of layered ethnographic accounts.

In 5 months of COVID isolation, living out of a suitcase in temporary housing, countless fractal patterns emerged. I can’t say if I created these patterns by looking for them, or that I know the whole world by looking at a grain of sand. The truth of the matter is that it feels like the key for massive scale change is just in front of us, but slipping from our grasp. As we move through these days, weeks, and months, we have very little time before the difference recedes again. I address this matter of concern as a matter of method in performative grounded theory piece.

The idea of doing a self-guided series of prompts for a largescale project in the midst of a global pandemic emerged as a solution to the twin problems of distance and distraction. The goal of a “21-day autoethnography challenge” set of self-guided prompts was to build embodied sensibilities toward the material we study, practice autoethnographic forms of writing and analysis, and transform personal experiences through this COVID-19 moment into critical understanding of scale, sensemaking, and relationality of humans, nonhumans, and the planet. This article showcases the prompts to illustrate the method and flexible adaptation required for the project.