Introduction: a massive and microscopic lockdown

In May and June of 2020, more than 165 researchers, artists, and activists from 26 coun­tries became involved in a co-cre­ative research-cre­ation prac­tice that mobi­lized crit­i­cal autoethnog­ra­phy to col­lec­tive­ly process indi­vid­ual embod­ied, affec­tive, polit­i­cal, and cog­ni­tive sen­si­bil­i­ties that were chal­lenged and made more vis­i­ble by COVID-19 lock­downs and sub­se­quent events (Markham, Har­ris and Luka 2020). The goal of the 21-day Mas­sive Micro Sense­mak­ing autoethnog­ra­phy chal­lenge was to use self-guid­ed prompts to build embod­ied sen­si­bil­i­ties toward the mate­r­i­al this emer­gent com­mu­ni­ty of prac­tice was study­ing. It also enabled a shared prac­tice of autoethno­graph­ic forms of writ­ing and mak­ing, and trans­formed per­son­al expe­ri­ences through the COVID-19 moment into crit­i­cal under­stand­ings of scale, sense-mak­ing, and the rela­tion­al­i­ty of humans, non­hu­mans, and the plan­et. As the project unfold­ed, it increas­ing­ly engaged with image-based ver­nac­u­lars, par­tic­u­lar­ly through a pri­vate Face­book group (Fig­ure 1), but also in Google docs and on the group’s email list­serv. Some­times guid­ed but often unso­licit­ed, this ver­nac­u­lar includ­ed shared images, images as respons­es, videos, and audio clips. In this spe­cial issue of Imag­i­na­tions, the authors, edi­tors, and co-edi­tors work col­lec­tive­ly to weave togeth­er a series of dia­logues, method­olog­i­cal approach­es, and mate­ri­al­i­ties that reflect on and the­o­rize the sen­so­r­i­al nature of the expe­ri­ences that were first doc­u­ment­ed through the shared crit­i­cal autoethno­graph­ic prac­tices dur­ing and after the inter­na­tion­al Mas­sive Micro Sense­mak­ing exper­i­ment. These pieces reflect the out­comes of what we ret­ro­spec­tive­ly under­stand as an emerg­ing and col­lab­o­ra­tive form of crit­i­cal ped­a­gogy, as well as the for­ma­tion of a Com­mu­ni­ty of Prac­tice (CoP) in response to a major glob­al crisis.

Mas­sive Micro Sense­mak­ing (MMS) came into being in April 2020, just weeks after many of the first nation­al bor­der clo­sures and lock­downs to guard against the grow­ing COVID-19 pan­dem­ic were announced. While the World Health Orga­ni­za­tion (WHO) had declared the virus a pub­lic health emer­gency on Jan­u­ary 30 and a glob­al pan­dem­ic on March 11,¹ bor­der clo­sures and lock­downs only arrived in mid-March in most places around the world. These includ­ed Aus­tralia (March 13),² Den­mark (March 11),³ and the Unit­ed States (March 13)⁴, with the Euro­pean Union (March 17), Cana­da (March 20),⁵ and India (March 24)⁶ com­ing a week later—to name just a few of the coun­tries where MMS par­tic­i­pants were locat­ed. The impulse to gen­er­ate a com­mu­ni­ty of prac­tice of 165 artists, schol­ars, and activists ground­ed in ethno­graph­ic visu­al cul­ture came much ear­li­er. Annette Markham reached out to sev­er­al col­leagues around the world start­ing in Feb­ru­ary and March, becom­ing increas­ing­ly aware that (glob­al­ly) we were about to go through a col­lec­tive expe­ri­ence that few would have expe­ri­enced on this scale before. By late March, Dan Har­ris was involved as a co-lead on the project, and Mary Eliz­a­beth (M.E.) Luka joined short­ly after, behind the scenes, to pre­pare for and help orga­nize the project. Ini­tial­ly, the intent was to use a call for a spe­cial issue of a jour­nal (see https://​future​mak​ing​.space/​c​a​l​l​-​f​o​r​-​p​a​r​t​i​c​i​p​a​t​i​on/) to solic­it a dozen or so expres­sions of inter­est and then build an autoethno­graph­ic col­lab­o­ra­tion. Instead, more than 150 peo­ple respond­ed to the call, express­ing their urgent and often poignant desires to par­tic­i­pate with oth­ers in mak­ing sense of the rad­i­cal changes hap­pen­ing in their every­day lives as a result of the pan­dem­ic. Markham and Har­ris rec­og­nized that MMS had already start­ed to coa­lesce as a com­mu­ni­ty of prac­tice. MMS as a col­lab­o­ra­tive autoethno­graph­ic creative/critical research response was born. We (Markham, Har­ris, and Luka) devel­oped a 21-day series of crit­i­cal autoethno­graph­ic prompts (Markham and Har­ris 2020) in late April and ear­ly May that then rolled out over a pri­vate Face­book group and an email list­serv between May 18 and June 7, 2020. These prompts always includ­ed a spe­cif­ic writ­ing, think­ing, draw­ing, map­ping, or oth­er­wise per­for­ma­tive exer­cise to be com­plet­ed in 24 hours if pos­si­ble, along with the same ‘mantra’ about the over­all goal of the 21-day autoethnog­ra­phy chal­lenge (see Fig­ure 2).

Giv­en that there were peo­ple from 26 coun­tries involved from time zones around the world, many of the prompts were designed to be con­duct­ed at a time that felt right to indi­vid­ual par­tic­i­pants. The prompts were post­ed and emailed so as to be avail­able first thing in the morn­ing in the south­ern hemi­sphere, which meant that it looked like the prompts were cir­cu­lat­ed the night before in the north­ern hemi­sphere. And while some prompts asked group mem­bers to deep­en an inquiry start­ed in an ear­li­er prompt, there was plen­ty of lee­way to decide how to respond to the prompts. Sev­er­al of the prompts asked peo­ple to use visu­al imagery and arts, sound, dance or move­ment, and video record­ings, as well as writ­ten work, includ­ing prose, poet­ry, and more aca­d­e­m­ic writ­ing (as they chose). One par­tic­i­pant respond­ed by cre­at­ing a paint­ing over the 21 days. Oth­ers respond­ed by con­struct­ing and assem­bling quilts as well as in writ­ing (indeed, one of the quilts pro­vides a thread of con­nec­tion to the arti­cles in this issue). Many par­tic­i­pants exper­i­ment­ed with the sen­so­r­i­al oppor­tu­ni­ties offered through the visu­al and per­form­ing arts prompts pro­vid­ed through­out the 21-day peri­od as ways to adapt to their new real­i­ties in the ear­ly, fright­en­ing days of the pan­dem­ic. Prompt 1 reflects the spir­it of the MMS expe­ri­ence, includ­ing the ear­ly and very tem­po­rary opti­mism just weeks after ini­tial lock­downs in the south­ern hemi­sphere (see Fig­ures 3 and 4).

For the par­tic­i­pants involved in the Face­book group, there was a lot of spon­ta­neous upload­ing of images or writ­ing, with plen­ty of peer encour­age­ment for shar­ing respons­es, no mat­ter how raw or revealing—so long as the per­son upload­ing the mate­r­i­al was com­fort­able doing so. And while some peo­ple knew a few of the oth­er peo­ple in the group when the 21-day prompts began, most peo­ple didn’t know many oth­ers. So, this expe­ri­ence of shar­ing work-in-progress, or more accu­rate­ly, work-barely-begun—particularly on a visu­al­ly-ori­ent­ed plat­form sub­ject to Amer­i­can laws of social media surveillance—became quite a vul­ner­a­ble and pro­tec­tive space for emerg­ing and more estab­lished artists and schol­ars to inter­act in both sup­port­ive and sup­port­ed ways. These works-bare­ly-begun took many shapes and forms, some of which are rep­re­sent­ed in Fig­ures 5-8 below.

Making sense of change in a community of practice

The COVID-19 pan­dem­ic upset mas­sive eco­nom­ic, aes­thet­ic, lifestyle, and polit­i­cal sys­tems, among oth­ers. At the quo­tid­i­an lev­el, even the tini­est habits were chal­lenged, includ­ing food acces­si­bil­i­ty or per­mis­sion to hug some­one. The 21-day autoethno­graph­ic chal­lenge act­ed as a locus of activ­i­ty around which nar­ra­tives to iter­a­tive­ly explain, analyse, or resist the mas­sive changes demand­ed local­ly and glob­al­ly dur­ing the pan­dem­ic could be sketched out or prac­ticed. This broad­er goal was reflect­ed in our shared desires to do some­thing use­ful and gen­er­a­tive dur­ing lock­downs and beyond. While we (Luka, Markham, and Har­ris) have each used arts-based meth­ods in dif­fer­ent ways (includ­ing for MMS), it is Markham’s long-time engage­ment with micro­scop­ic obser­va­tion and analy­sis in com­bi­na­tion with dig­i­tal or online ethno­graph­ic meth­ods-as-ethics in com­mu­ni­ties of prac­tice (e.g. Markham and Buchanan 2015), and as a form of crit­i­cal ped­a­gogy (e.g. Markham 2019) that pro­vid­ed a glob­al frame­work for MMS. Sim­i­lar­ly, Harris’s mod­el­ling of crit­i­cal and car­ing autoethno­graph­ic prac­tices and Markham’s engage­ment with brico­lage and the micro­scop­ic shaped many of the details of the prompts. Luka’s long expe­ri­ence of and research about the con­sid­er­able behind-the-scenes work of design and plan­ning required to nur­ture col­lec­tive projects and to pro­lif­er­ate media-mak­ing added a time- and image-based dynam­ic (e.g. Luka 2018).

The MMS project is a good exam­ple of a delib­er­ate attempt to fos­ter a dynam­ic cohe­sive com­mu­ni­ty of prac­tice (CoP) dur­ing a glob­al cri­sis. In lit­er­a­ture about the com­po­si­tion, process­es, and com­mit­ments of CoPs, Wenger, McDer­mott, and Sny­der (2002) note that CoPs com­prise peo­ple who come togeth­er to exam­ine sim­i­lar (often com­plex) prob­lems in the world, par­tic­u­lar­ly emer­gent or press­ing issues. While often mobi­lized in health-based research and clin­i­cal envi­ron­ments, in recent years, find­ing ways to devel­op CoPs in oth­er work envi­ron­ments (such as in acad­e­mia or in pri­vate cor­po­ra­tions) has been one way to accel­er­ate knowl­edge-shar­ing or solu­tions to prob­lems. By work­ing togeth­er or (through peri­od­ic inter­ac­tion) in par­al­lel with one anoth­er, a group or groups seek to share tac­it and emer­gent knowl­edge to bet­ter address unex­pect­ed devel­op­ments (Had­jimichael and Tsoukas 2019), to col­lec­tive­ly gen­er­ate new knowl­edge, or to devel­op a cohe­sive way of respond­ing to unusu­al sit­u­a­tions (Dör­fler and Ack­er­mann 2012). In addi­tion, as Pyrko, Dör­fler, and Eden (2019) note, such learn­ing-togeth­er is bound­ed by ongo­ing dis­cus­sions and relationship-building—or as Luka has put it in the con­text of dig­i­tal media pro­duc­tion, by mak­ing some­thing togeth­er for use not just by the artists and mak­ers but by the whole com­mu­ni­ty (2022). And while many CoPs devel­op organ­i­cal­ly, it is pos­si­ble to gen­er­ate a CoP in response to a par­tic­u­lar sit­u­a­tion. This was the case, for exam­ple, for the vac­cine-devel­op­ment com­mu­ni­ty that was able to devel­op, test, and dis­trib­ute sev­er­al kinds of vac­cines with­in months of the virus appear­ing, with the help of bil­lions of dol­lars of research fund­ing as well as nation-state and glob­al man­dates. More mod­est­ly, this was also the case for Mas­sive Micro Sense­mak­ing, a CoP of 165 peo­ple whose degrees of sep­a­ra­tion from one anoth­er was no more than two. The CoP built on Annette Markham’s exten­sive inter­na­tion­al net­work of (often dig­i­tal) ethno­graph­ic researchers and cre­ative prac­ti­tion­ers where it inter­sect­ed with Dan Harris’s equal­ly extend­ed net­work of crit­i­cal autoethno­graph­ic researchers and artists. These exist­ing net­works were aug­ment­ed by the snow­ball effect of infor­ma­tion about this project rolling through oth­er loose­ly con­nect­ed net­works, and through spe­cif­ic out­reach invi­ta­tions, such as Luka’s involve­ment of 19 grad­u­ate stu­dents in MMS through a Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to course. While the ini­tial 21-day prompt expe­ri­ence was tak­en up by 165 peo­ple, what is equal­ly remark­able is that more than half of these indi­vid­u­als sub­se­quent­ly par­tic­i­pat­ed in one of the oth­er MMS pub­li­ca­tion projects described below (spe­cial issues, exhi­bi­tion, etc.). Each of these small­er projects devel­oped its own way of work­ing togeth­er and apart—some at arms-length, some with plen­ty of coach­ing from pub­li­ca­tion edi­tors, and some with more inter­est in col­lec­tive ways of working.

To facil­i­tate the rich­ness of a CoP in prac­tice, the 21-day chal­lenge built a cur­ricu­lum of iter­a­tive and con­nect­ed prompts, and encour­aged col­lab­o­ra­tion through post­ing and shar­ing, giv­ing feed­back, and work­ing with oth­ers on cer­tain tasks. In oth­er words, the prompts were not ran­dom­ly pre­sent­ed, but sequen­tial­ly for­mu­lat­ed so the lat­er prompts would build on ear­li­er prompts, and the prompts encour­aged dif­fer­ent types of the­o­ret­i­cal and ana­lyt­i­cal respons­es. Although this was exper­i­men­tal, this strat­e­gy drew on the col­lec­tive edu­ca­tion­al exper­tise of Markham, Har­ris, and Luka, who each have exper­tise in teach­ing ana­lyt­i­cal and crit­i­cal think­ing through cre­ative practice.

We would argue both these fac­tors aid­ed in the emer­gence of a large scale CoP—not only did we bring togeth­er and build a plat­form for a net­work of peo­ple inter­est­ed in a com­mon goal to study the lived impact of a pan­dem­ic, we also designed and mind­ful­ly facil­i­tat­ed a crit­i­cal ped­a­gog­i­cal frame­work to guide how this col­lab­o­ra­tive and col­lec­tive study of the pan­dem­ic would pro­ceed. This is illus­trat­ed, if not dis­cussed in var­i­ous ways, by some more direct­ly than oth­ers, in the pieces of this spe­cial issue as well as the oth­er pub­li­ca­tions with MMS, as we describe below.

Producing, thinking, making

While the inten­sive expe­ri­ence of the 21-day autoethno­graph­ic chal­lenge built a gen­er­ous intel­lec­tu­al and cre­ative CoP, and bridged a sig­nif­i­cant peri­od of uncer­tain­ty, the project also yield­ed schol­ar­ly and cre­ative out­comes. Once the ini­tial 21-day peri­od was over, we focused on gen­er­at­ing pub­li­ca­tions for schol­ar­ly jour­nals and exhi­bi­tion oppor­tu­ni­ties that would encour­age peo­ple to find ways to deep­en their engage­ment with the work they had start­ed in response to the pan­dem­ic and through the MMS expe­ri­ence. The first of these was a spe­cial issue for Qual­i­ta­tive Inquiry (see Markham, Har­ris, and Luka 2020), which includ­ed 22 arti­cles. The peer review process was accom­plished in less than six weeks, with the issue released by August of 2020. The­mat­i­cal­ly, the arti­cles focused on pri­mar­i­ly micro-lev­el expe­ri­ences gen­er­at­ed through the 21-day autoethnog­ra­phy prac­tice in the con­text of an expo­nen­tial­ly grow­ing glob­al pan­dem­ic. Many of the authors referred to how this gen­er­at­ed an intense CoP, whose mem­bers felt both deeply alone and high­ly con­nect­ed to the inter­na­tion­al cohort of artists and schol­ars that was still emerg­ing dur­ing the 21-day autoethno­graph­ic chal­lenge and through the peri­od that they wrote these ear­ly pieces. The sec­ond project was a series of videos gen­er­at­ed in response to two prompts requir­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion (Prompt 3 and Prompt 21; see fig­ures 11 and 12 respec­tive­ly). The videos were curat­ed and intro­duced by Har­ris, Markham, and Luka for the Mark De Gar­mo Vir­tu­al Inter­na­tion­al Arts (VIA) Fes­ti­val for Social Change in the fall of 2020. As Luka notes in this issue: “Many of the videos fea­tured at the Octo­ber 27 VIA Fes­ti­val event took a close look at the expe­ri­ence of sud­den­ly enforced iso­la­tion, with sev­er­al using sim­i­lar­ly jar­ring jux­ta­po­si­tions of sound, image and text” (“Resilience in Pan­dem­ic Sense­mak­ing: Think­ing Through a Com­mu­ni­ty of Prac­tice,” this issue). As with the writ­ten work fea­tured in the Qual­i­ta­tive Inquiry issue, then, these videos pre­sent­ed and reflect­ed on quite raw expe­ri­ences using time-based media that incor­po­rat­ed sta­t­ic and mov­ing images, and sound design.

The third project is an anthol­o­gy focused on arts edu­ca­tion and arts-based method­olo­gies employ­ing crit­i­cal autoethnog­ra­phy approach­es, titled Massive/Micro Autoethnog­ra­phy: Cre­ative Learn­ing in COVID Times (Har­ris, Luka, and Markham, in press). While first drafts for this project were devel­oped con­cur­rent­ly with the first and sec­ond MMS projects, at the time of this writ­ing, they are just now in-press. The longer lead-time has enabled the authors and edi­tors to sift in/through more lay­ers of reflec­tion and devel­op­ment in the year that has passed since the 21-day prompt series end­ed. The focus on arts edu­ca­tion method­olo­gies means that the work pre­sent­ed there looks at the rela­tion­ships among stu­dents, researchers, and cre­ative prac­ti­tion­ers in learn­ing environments.

That brings us to this spe­cial issue of Imag­i­na­tions. While a few artists or authors par­tic­i­pat­ed in more than one of the four publications/exhibitions for the MMS project, for the most part each per­son self-select­ed and then was peer-reviewed into the project(s) that best suit­ed their work. This was accom­plished through par­tic­i­pant respons­es to a sec­ond MMS call for papers/exhibition mate­ri­als, which Markham, Har­ris, and Luka sort­ed accord­ing to the type of pub­li­ca­tion or exhi­bi­tion venue that would best show­case and enable each author’s research, not just in the MMS con­text, but more gen­er­al­ly around the pan­dem­ic itself, and oth­er work under­way. This spe­cial issue of Imag­i­na­tions became the space for some of the more enig­mat­ic or pro­duc­tive­ly unre­solved work that was devel­oped in this inter­na­tion­al Com­mu­ni­ty of Prac­tice. Of all the ten­ta­cles of work that con­tin­ue to emerge from the MMS expe­ri­ence, this one mobi­lizes the use of metaphor, frag­men­ta­tion, pat­tern-build­ing, and mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nar­i­ty in found poet­ry, time-based media, and fic­tion (among oth­er forms), and the oscillation—sometimes the collisions—between schol­ar­ly, social, and col­lab­o­ra­tive work ground­ed in visu­al cul­tur­al stud­ies and the­o­ry, as well as in the dig­i­tal. Authors involved in this issue use cross-cul­tur­al image, autoethno­graph­ic, and research-cre­ation stud­ies to advance learn­ings from a range of dis­ci­pli­nary and socio-cul­tur­al per­spec­tives in the wake of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, includ­ing its impacts on schol­ars, artists, and activists. Col­lec­tive­ly, they extend con­tem­po­rary dig­i­tal, ethno­graph­ic, cre­ativ­i­ty, and cul­tur­al stud­ies schol­ar­ship by incor­po­rat­ing inter­na­tion­al reflec­tions on glob­al dig­i­tal medi­a­tion, cul­tur­al pro­duc­tion, col­o­niza­tion, Black Lives Mat­ter, and oth­er con­cur­rent geo-polit­i­cal issues and frame­works that have marked the pandemic’s tra­jec­to­ries and impacts. The extend­ing of such tra­jec­to­ries has also result­ed in sev­er­al con­fer­ence pre­sen­ta­tions in spaces that are part-vir­tu­al, part-in-per­son, some­times high­ly aca­d­e­m­ic and some­times wild­ly explorato­ry, as 2021 unwinds.

Stitching together the issue

As the authors involved in this issue began work­ing togeth­er, it rapid­ly became clear that both a metaphor­i­cal and ana­lyt­i­cal stitch­ing togeth­er of the themes and research would be cru­cial for orga­niz­ing and mak­ing sense of the work on offer. Cre­ative and crit­i­cal autoethno­graph­ic engage­ments in this issue include the use of video-mak­ing, quilt­ing, lis­ten­ing modal­i­ties, pho­tog­ra­phy, poet­ry, and oth­er forms of image-mak­ing and cross-cul­tur­al image stud­ies. The nine quilt blocks pro­duced by artist/author Corin­na Peterken dur­ing the 21-day autoethno­graph­ic exper­i­ment became a visu­al ral­ly­ing form around which the three group­ings pre­sent­ed in this issue could con­gre­gate, assem­ble, dis­as­sem­ble, and reassem­ble. Indeed, the sequence and focus of each of the three group­ings for the issue have been rethought numer­ous times as the authors sought to exer­cise col­lec­tive feed­back loops involv­ing oth­er issue par­tic­i­pants (co-authors, co-edi­tors, edi­tors, and oth­er authors) as well as through the usu­al peer review process facil­i­tat­ed by the edi­tors. The piec­ing togeth­er of the issue as a col­lab­o­ra­tive exer­cise was a mate­r­i­al foun­da­tion for the issue’s the­mat­ics that is echoed in the key visu­al metaphor of the quilt, fur­ther explored in the co-edi­tors’ col­lec­tive­ly-writ­ten reflec­tion (Carl­son, Golo­vati­na-Mora, Peterken, Snep­vangers, Soro­nen, Talvi­tie-Lam­berg). The metaphor of—and actu­al images from—one of the participant’s quilts grounds the analy­sis and pre­sen­ta­tion of the arti­cles, play­ing “an active part” in reflec­tion and pro­duc­tion (Barad 2003, 803). In a mate­r­i­al sense, the bound­aries and break­downs between the self/social, massive/micro, and more com­plex dynam­ics are explored in the three group­ings of three or four metaphor­i­cal quilt blocks (arti­cles) that map chang­ing rela­tions on to one another.

The first four arti­cles are thor­ough­ly ground­ed in work that emerged direct­ly from engage­ment in MMS. Corin­na Peterken’s (USA and Aus­tralia) offer­ing delin­eates not just her use of quilt­ing as a metaphor, but also sets us down the path of using that metaphor through­out the spe­cial issue. Peterken exam­ines the flux­es and flex­i­ble expe­ri­ences of time—especially in the ear­ly days of lockdown—that length­en and col­lapse (Ingold 2013), with no atten­tion to mark­ings on a clock, which means that it feels like days melt togeth­er into a week, or a month. The pro­duc­tion of her quilt acts as a sense­mak­ing response to COVID, enabling a more visu­al mode of re-ground­ing our notions of time. Kim Snep­vangers (Aus­tralia) and Mary Rose McLaren (Aus­tralia) both acknowl­edge and respond to some of the bro­ken social threads to which COVID-19 con­tributed and var­i­ous ways of cop­ing and repair­ing these threads, includ­ing our respons­es to col­o­niza­tion, cli­mate change and calami­tous weath­er events, as well as the move­ment of refugees and dev­as­tat­ing polit­i­cal events such as the shoot­ings that pre­cip­i­tat­ed the resur­gence of Black Lives Mat­ter protests in the USA and around the world. Such events gen­er­ate some­times debil­i­tat­ing and yet clar­i­fy­ing inten­si­ties of feel­ings marked by uncer­tain­ty and change. Snep­vangers offers a com­plex piece of writ­ing that the­o­rizes sense­mak­ing, colo­nial­ism, and the pan­dem­ic in Aus­tralia. She intro­duces the notion of invol­un­tary neigh­bour­hood sur­veil­lance (picked up lat­er in this issue by Andy Fis­ch­er Wright) and long­stand­ing colo­nial oppres­sions in Botany Bay, Aus­tralia by exam­in­ing the rep­e­ti­tion of the munic­i­pal logo imprint­ed on the many garbage and organ­ics bins stand­ing to atten­tion in her neigh­bour­hood through­out the lock­down days of the pan­dem­ic as a depar­ture point for her reflec­tions and analy­sis. McLaren cre­ates visu­al­ly-appeal­ing, pow­er­ful found poet­ry to respond to the seem­ing­ly infi­nite anx­i­ety-pro­duc­ing instances of cri­sis, from unprece­dent­ed bush fires in Aus­tralia to the glob­al pan­dem­ic and the resur­gence of social protest for Black Lives Mat­ter. The sec­tion is closed out by a reflec­tion on the notion of resilience—a term that rever­ber­at­ed through­out the pandemic—through Luka’s (Cana­da) analy­sis of the MMS videos used in the VIA Fes­ti­val pro­gram­ming in Octo­ber 2020.

The sec­ond group­ing of arti­cles traces out a seem­ing­ly more dis­tant con­nec­tion to MMS, explor­ing com­ple­men­tary (auto)ethnographic expe­ri­ences. From Japan, Rebec­ca Carl­son puz­zles out a series of abstract and yet observ­able real­i­ties and genet­ic pos­si­bil­i­ties at an exper­i­men­tal bio­science lab dur­ing COVID-19 that took place con­cur­rent­ly with her involve­ment in MMS. As par­al­lel ethno­graph­ic sites of com­plex inter­ac­tions, Carl­son con­stant­ly remakes her rela­tions in the lab with rapid­ly-chang­ing data at the bio­log­i­cal and social lev­els, spring­board­ing from a con­sid­er­a­tion of the pic­ture of one grey and white striped mouse. Andy Fis­ch­er Wright (USA) nar­rows the enquiry to the high­ly local (acti­vat­ing analy­sis of the micro­scop­ic dur­ing MMS in his neigh­bour­hood), reit­er­at­ing anti-racism and ter­ri­to­ry themes intro­duced in the first group of arti­cles, above. He devel­ops the con­cept of “noti­fic­tions,” based on com­pul­sive neigh­bourly sur­veil­lance that con­tin­ues to take place on visu­al and text-based social media apps such as Nextdoor and Neigh­bors in the USA. Donatel­la Del­la Rat­ta (Italy) shifts the focus to the expe­ri­ence of stu­dents online and in the class­room dur­ing ear­ly pan­dem­ic con­di­tions, bring­ing this into dia­logue with some of the under­pin­nings of the MMS enquiry. Her work on frag­men­ta­tion the­o­ry (Markham 2005) leads us quite nice­ly into Annette Markham’s dis­cus­sion of pat­tern-seek­ing work while home­less in Den­mark, en route to Aus­tralia dur­ing a pan­dem­ic, and while co-lead­ing MMS.

The final group­ing of arti­cles explores the dig­i­tal and per­son­al inti­ma­cies dis­rupt­ed and reshaped by the pan­dem­ic. This group of authors analy­ses how our vis­cer­al expe­ri­ences of uncer­tain­ty, fear, anx­i­ety, and dis­trac­tion var­ied through­out the pan­dem­ic. Veron­i­ca Mitchell (South Africa) uses her time with a patch­work of imagery and thread in Cape Town, not just as a relax­ing dis­trac­tion sep­a­rat­ed from her world of research and know­ing in the dis­ci­pline of obstet­rics, but also as a way to help make sense of it before, dur­ing and after COVID-19. Anne Soro­nen and Karoli­ina Talvi­tie-Lam­berg (Fin­land) trou­ble a layperson’s under­stand­ing of what “lis­ten­ing” means dur­ing a social cri­sis, and exam­ine the ways in which the severe health cri­sis in Fin­land and the fre­quent use of dif­fer­ent media chan­nels and com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nolo­gies pre­cip­i­tat­ed a deaf­en­ing range of online lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ences, and the affec­tive ambiva­lence that arose from these expe­ri­ences glob­al­ly. Final­ly, Poli­na Golováti­na-Mora (Nor­way and Colum­bia) mobi­lizes new mate­ri­alisms through the rhi­zomat­ic fram­ing of Deleuze and Guat­tari (2005) and the spec­u­la­tive fram­ing of Don­na Har­away (2013) in the neigh­bour­hoods of her mind and emo­tion­al states to prof­fer frag­ments of feel­ings, reac­tions, analy­ses, and descrip­tions of the con­di­tions of lock­down in Colum­bia. She explores the in-between spaces, leaps, rup­tures, and skip­pings involved in her search for an alter­na­tive con­ti­nu­ity, for a decen­tral­ized and decen­tral­iz­ing order that can nonethe­less oper­ate at both the self and the social lev­el, and that makes sense by decon­struct­ing and dis­rupt­ing the sen­si­bil­i­ties and obser­va­tions offered to us by var­i­ous author­i­ties in COVID times.

Pref­ac­ing these three core group­ings is a col­lab­o­ra­tive and con­tex­tu­al offer­ing from the co-edi­tors for this issue: Rebec­ca Carl­son, Poli­na Golováti­na-Mora, Corin­na Peterken, Kim Snep­vangers, Anne Soro­nen, and Karoli­ina Talvitie-Lamberg.

Pollinating the future

The work for this jour­nal issue ranges from research that close­ly analy­ses the MMS expe­ri­ence 18 months on, through par­al­lel or com­ple­men­tary autoethno­graph­ic expe­ri­ences that the authors went through at the same time they were engaged in MMS, and on to work that pur­sues tan­gents, frag­ments, and addi­tion­al foci for (post-) pan­dem­ic-based research. What sets this issue apart from pri­or research reports and out­comes of this project are three things. First, this issue has had time to breathe, time to reflect on more than 18 months’ expe­ri­ence with the virus and its impacts, as well as on the way in which research has been gen­er­at­ed dur­ing that peri­od. Sec­ond is the way that this issue rep­re­sents the ongo­ing live­li­ness and poten­tial of the col­lec­tive imper­a­tives of the MMS CoP. Indeed, this is fur­ther rein­forced through sev­er­al reports from MMS mem­bers about how the MMS prompts have been adopt­ed or adapt­ed and applied across a wide range of teach­ing spaces and oppor­tu­ni­ties (cf. Her­man et al. 2021). Third are that the seeds of research, which ger­mi­nat­ed dur­ing the 21-day autoethno­graph­ic exer­cise in May and June 2020, have grown togeth­er as a dia­log­i­cal research-cre­ation and co-writ­ing/­co-edit­ing approach that involves not just this spe­cif­ic group of 13 of the orig­i­nal par­tic­i­pants, but also the sup­port of the broad­er CoP. The visu­al metaphor of the quilt that threads the works togeth­er act­ed as an anchor for link­ing the sep­a­rate arti­cles togeth­er, but the col­lec­tive work and dis­cus­sion that took place for a full year after the first drafts were devel­oped reflect­ed an ongo­ing com­mit­ment to think­ing and feel­ing togeth­er. Even the writ­ing, image-mak­ing, and analy­sis that did not make it to final stages for this issue helped to shape the over­all sen­si­bil­i­ty of this par­tic­u­lar col­lec­tion. So, too, did the ear­li­er works from MMS that are ref­er­enced in many of the arti­cles includ­ed here. This mat­ters because in the time of COVID—or indeed in this time of per­sis­tent and com­plex human­i­tar­i­an and glob­al crises—we need many exam­ples of gen­eros­i­ty and col­lab­o­ra­tion as well as cri­tique to help us think, feel, and see our way into the future.