Lockdown time, time loops, and the crisis of the future

Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science

This paper investigates one aspect of meaning making that occurs in the wake of systemic change. It addresses the question of how time is re-configured by socio-material changes resultant from the COVID-19 pandemic. Employing a semiotic perspective, we aim to describe a process of disruption and distress, which leads to a recognition of the oddness of ‘covid-time.’ This is characterised by distressing ‘suspended waiting’, a despairing frozen temporality. After this, this odd covid-time is semiotically assimilated into the old and familiar. Distressing ‘suspended time’ is transformed into ‘productive time’, ‘normal time’, and ‘transformational time’ as an attempt to regulate affect. By highlighting this semiotic shift, the theory of the Cultural Psychology of Semiotic Dynamics (Valsiner, 2014) is used to highlight how meaning is constructed using cultural resources.

Science & Education

The crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic led most people all over the world to deal with a change in their perception and organization of time. This happened also, and mainly, within the educational institutions, where students and teachers had to rearrange their teaching/learning dynamics because of the forced education at a distance. In this paper, we present an exploratory qualitative study with secondary school students aimed to investigate how they were experiencing their learning during lockdown and how, in particular, learning of science contributed to rearranging their daily lifetime rituals. In order to design and carry out our investigation, we borrowed constructs coming from a research field rather unusual for science education: the field ofsociology of time. The main result concerns the discovery of the potential of the dichotomy betweenalienation from timeandtime re-appropriation.The former is a construct elaborated by the sociologist Hartmut Rosa to describe the society...

Memory Studies, 2021

Since the first lockdown in March 2020, time seems to have slowed to a continuous present tense. The Greek language has three words to express different experiences of time: aion, chronos and kairos. If aion is the boundless and limbo-like time of eternity, chronos represents chronological, sequential, and linear time. Kairos, however, signifies the rupture of ordinary time with the opportune moment, epiphany and redemption, revolution, and most broadly, crisis and emergency. This paper argues that the pandemic is impacting how individuals perceive time in two ways: first, as a distortion of time in which individuals are caught between linear time (chronos) and rupture (kairos) invoking the state of emergency and second, as an extended present that blurs the passing of chronological time with its seeming eternity (aion). As a result of the perceived suspension of ordinary time, temporal understandings of the future are postponed, while the past hovers like a ghost over the present.

Qualitative Inquiry

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.

Medium, 2020

L Foran 'The Time of a Pandemic. Or, Why We Can't Get Anything done in Lockdown' A piece reflecting on the experience of time during the first COVID lockdown of Spring/Summer 2020.

Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 2022

In the face of COVID-19 shutdowns, much of the world fundamentally adjusted its relationship to time, space, work, productivity, and rest. In this essay, I theorize the pandemic as forcing many people to live within “sick spacetime,” which involves 1) experiencing inconsistent mobility, 2) acknowledging the precarity of our bodyminds, and 3) living in the liminal state of being constantly in-wait. I use “sick spacetime” to problematize widespread calls for the “return to normal,” then outline a politics of crip/sick futurity in which orientations to time and space remain flexible as pandemic restrictions ease.

Extrapolation, 2022

Historically, a wide variety of topics appear in discussions about pandemics, from medical issues to apocalyptic and religious visions. These themes can also be found in recent essays and literary fiction produced in Latin America. In this essay I argue that lack of distance and perspective from the COVID-19 pandemic seems to rob essays from any meditation about a freeing sublime imagery, or a cohesive vision for its thereafter. In other words, these deeply distressing events provide the backdrop for the emergence of radical figurative narratives that operate within/against what Tom Moylan would have called the emergence of apocalyptic hope. In contrast, postapocalyptic novels produced in Argentina since the turn of the century deal with these issues in a very different way. These novels showcase state projects that have imploded or are about to collapse, and where individual choices build the only possible forms of resistance should a future (be it dystopic or postapocalyptic) come into existence. In this essay I explore the different reasons allowing for this phenomenon: essays registering lived experiences and literature envisioning chaotic futures collide, and only the latter seems to be able to narrate our present in way that makes sense of the collective historic moment.

People have experienced many forms of temporal disorientation during the Covid-19 crisis. For this study, we collected a rich corpus of reports on the multifaceted experiences of disorientation during the pandemic. In this paper, we study the resulting corpus using a descriptive approach. We identify six emerging themes: temporal rift; temporal vertigo; impoverished time; tunnel vision; spatial and social scaffolding of time; suspended time. We offer a phenomenological analysis of each of the themes. Based on the phenomenological analysis, we draw a key distinction between episodic and existential forms of temporal disorientation, and we argue that the Covid-19 crisis is best conceptualised as a period of suspended time.

History of the Human Sciences, 2023

The COVID-19 pandemic has foregrounded the significance of time to everyday life, as the routines, pace, and speed of social relations were widely reconfigured. This article uses rhythm as an object and tool of inquiry to make sense of spatio-temporal change. We analyse the Mass Observation (MO) directive we co-commissioned on 'COVID-19 and Time', where volunteer writers reflect on whether and how time was made, experienced, and imagined differently during the early stages of the pandemic in the UK. We draw on Henri Lefebvre and Catherine Régulier's 'rhythmanalysis', taking up their theorisation of rhythm as linear and cyclical and their concepts of arrhythmia (discordant rhythms) and eurhythmia (harmonious rhythms). Our analysis highlights how MO writers articulate (a) the ruptures to their everyday rhythms across time and space, (b) their experience of 'blurred' or 'merged' time as everyday rhythms are dissolved and the pace of time is intensified or slowed, and (c) the remaking of rhythms through new practices or devices and attunements to nature. We show how rhythm enables a consideration of the spatio-temporal textures of everyday life, including their unevenness, variation, and difference. The article thus contributes to and expands recent scholarship on the social life of time, rhythm and rhythmanalysis, everyday life, and MO.

PCS Review, 2021

Quarantine cinema emerges as a film culture and genre characterized by its offering of alternative film practice and prevalent narratives in the time of COVID-19 pandemic. This phenomenon is a result of necessary adjustments to adapt in these trying times and a critical response to the social, political, and economic issues brought by a public health crisis. The research questions that this paper sought to answer deals with both the creative process and content: (a) How did the filmmakers of quarantine cinema and organizers of quarantine film festivals, despite the inevitable constraints and challenges, resiliently respond to the imperative need to change in terms of filmmaking and film screening? (b) What are the prevalent themes and patterns in the narratives of quarantine cinema that genuinely depicted the lived experiences based on the overlapping struggles and triumphs of the Filipinos during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic? The results indicate how quarantine cinema plays its part in sustaining art and culture amidst the virus outbreak by practicing alternative ways of film production that is limited and confined at homes and personal spaces; film aesthetics that deviate from the standardized forms, techniques, and styles; and film exhibition and events that heavily relied on social media and online platforms. Based on the recurring categories of themes in the narratives of quarantine cinema, these audiovisual productions significantly contribute to the data, proof, and collective memories that reveal how the Philippines and its people experienced the virus outbreak intended for cultural and social dialogue, criticism, and discourse.