Feeling, Making and Imagining Time: Everyday Temporal Experiences in the Covid-19 Pandemic

Supported by a British Academy Small Grant (SRG2021\211073), in collaboration with Mass Observation.

The research programme investigates people’s lived experiences of time during the unfolding Covid-19 pandemic in the UK. It responds to and captures the making of new rhythms and routines, the reconfiguring of imaginations of the past, present and future, and the feelings created as a result of the ongoing pandemic. It sees time as a crucial lens to better understand individual and collective imaginations and feelings, and the continuities and changes in shared and differentiated experiences, at this distinctive point in history. It analyses primary qualitative data from a specially commissioned Mass Observation directive on Covid-19 and time and other relevant directives, and generates new data through ‘feel tanks’, where small groups explore a specific feeling, such as stuckness or acceleration. Through journal articles, a short online article and an event held in collaboration with Mass Observation, it contributes to scholarly and public understandings of the pandemic and its consequences.