Pat Collier and Jim Connolly, EDLM’s director and co-director, presented a talk to the “Using Mass Observation’s Covid-19 Collections” seminar series, based at the University of Sussex (UK). The talk, entitled “Time shifts: Future orientation in pandemic everyday life,” took place virtually on October 13th, 2021. That day’s session also featured talks by Claire Cowie (University of Edinburgh) on The Lothian Diary Project and Victoria Boelman (The Young Foundation) on the Young Foundation’s Covid-19 and community life project. These two initiatives cover similar ground to EDLM, each considering how the pandemic reshaped the experience of everyday life and especially how place figured in the study of ordinary experiences.
Our paper considered how various aspects of the pandemic reshuffled people’s sense of time, something we’ve written about before on this site, hereand here. We’ve added something new in this paper, a closer look at the way in which living in Muncie matters as we write about our lives, including the immediate present and the longer term. Living in a rust belt town shapes the way some of our diarists represent themselves in their EDLM writing. Part of what we’re doing is applying the ideas developed by Lauren Berlant, that we’ve discussed on the EDLM blog recently (here, here, and here) to the material we’ve collected. Our plan is to publish this paper in the journal History of the Human Sciences (assuming it the editors accept it after peer review). We’ll have more to say on these issues as we revise the paper in the coming months.
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New Diary Day!
Please note as well that we’ve scheduled the next Diary Day for Friday, October 22. Sharpen your pencils and get ready to add new entries to our archive. If you’re not already signed up as a diarist, please contact us at edlmiddletown@gmail.com to do so.