Writing Ourselves Out: Collaborative Autoethnography from the Epicenter of a Pandemic

Collaborative Autoethnography from the Epicenter of a Pandemic

Abstract

The following text is the product of a collaborative writing group, who took up Curare’s call for coronavirus diaries in the Malinowskian style. As the United States became the epicenter of COVID-19 in March 2020, nine academics (graduate students and a professor from The New School for Social Research) trained their observation skills and recorded their introspections about their experiences from within. Though various social distancing measures stymied their previously mobile lifestyles, writing and meeting digitally took on cathartic resonance and provided a means for connection. In this text, a subset of four diarists present a few salient aspects of life during the pandemic, as the recursivity of writing and reading together not only pushed us beyond our interior spaces but also diffused our singular perspectives into a layered text that interrogates boundary formation, maintenance, and negotiation. Each section has a different author but includes ethnographic “data” from other diarists. The first piece is a metacognitive reflection on the methodology of diary writing and anthropologists navigating their positions as remote observers. The following sections localize globally pertinent topics on the meanings and materialities of mask-wearing; the challenges and dilemmas that emerged from a tepid social distancing policy; and the imaginaries of multispecies interactions opened up by hygiene/cleaning practices around COVID-19. This text represents reflexive and collaborative work. The ethnographers themselves move between subject/object positions. Scope, scale, and temporality are unfixed, lending a sense of dynamic collectivities and new possibilities that are evident in content and method.