Author Archives: nclarkesoton

Everyday Life in the Covid-19 Pandemic: Mass Observation’s 12th May Diaries

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This book will be published by Bloomsbury on 16 May 2024 (see https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/everyday-life-in-the-covid19-pandemic-9781350434691/). Below, I provide a summary. Before that, let me see if I can tempt you to read on by transcribing four endorsements/reviews of the book:

‘I defy anyone who lived through the lockdown months of 2020 not to be struck by a lightning bolt of recognition as they read these pages. Nick Clarke has brought us a spellbinding portrait of that time fashioned from the writing of diarists who voluntarily offered their words to the Mass Observation project. It is a symphonic work full of surprising harmonies and tragic dissonances, syncopated by the unbreakable will to keep on keeping on. This is collective writing at its very best’ (Ben Highmore, Professor of Cultural Studies, University of Sussex).

‘Early in the 2020 lockdown, Mass Observation asked the UK public to record the extraordinary times. In this innovative collage-style publication, Nick Clarke cleverly unites extracts from 5000 heartbreakingly tragic and devastatingly funny accounts, while skilfully contextualising the diaries with other pandemic literatures and Mass Observation’s own history. Highly recommended’ (Annebella Pollen, Professor of Visual and Material Culture, University of Brighton).

‘I read this book with mounting excitement. It takes us right back into the daily routine of the Covid-19 pandemic with the immediacy of a modernist novel. Clarke’s framing discussion of Mass Observation makes a compelling case for recasting the sociology of everyday life as a science of the people’ (Nick Hubble, Professor of Modern and Contemporary English, Brunel University).

‘The immense toll of death during the COVID-19 pandemic brought us face to face with life – and the specific lives of people often invisible to us. Shop workers. Bus and train drivers. National Health Service staff […] We stood outside our homes and clapped them. And now we seem to have forgotten them. But thanks to Nick Clarke, there is now an opportunity to reconsider the importance of the lives around us. His book Everyday Life in the Covid-19 Pandemic provides a “humanising and democratic account” of one day during the pandemic – May 12, 2020 […] It is a magnificent piece of work’ (Richard Horton, editor-in-chief, The Lancet).

My starting point for the book was a few lines from Richard Horton’s The COVID-19 Catastrophe (Polity, 2021). Reflecting on health-science accounts of the pandemic, Horton wrote:

‘This was a pandemic that was described and reported in terms of statistics […] Lives were transformed into mathematical summaries […] But those who died cannot and should not be summarised […] Our way of describing the impact of the pandemic erased the biographies of the dead. The science and politics of COVID-19 became exercises in radical dehumanisation’ (pxvi).

‘So what must we say about the politics of COVID-19? We must say, I think, that it is our task to uncover the biographies of those who have lived and died with COVID-19. It is our task to resist the biologicalisation of the disease […] It is our task to understand what this disease means to the lives of those it has afflicted’ (p153).

My aim for this book was to remember the Covid-19 pandemic, as it impacted the UK, through an alternative account. This would be a humanising account focused on biography and meaning; a supplement to the ‘dehumanising’ accounts described by Horton. It would be a democratic account presenting the voices of many different people; a supplement to existing ‘expert’ interpretations by journalists, historians, and cultural theorists. It would occupy the space between the ‘factual narrative account’ of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry and the symbolism of the National Covid Memorial Wall.

But how to construct such an account? The book presents extracts from diaries collected by the Mass Observation Archive. Mass-Observation was originally founded in 1937. One of its earliest projects was the day-survey of 12 May 1937 (George VI’s Coronation Day). In 1975, the Mass Observation Archive was founded. In 2010, it established a new 12 May project, collecting day-diaries from volunteers across the UK every 12 May. In the weeks following 12 May 2020, the MOA received over 5000 such diaries.

Who are the diarists? As volunteers, they are not formally representative of the UK population. Indeed, many of them are what might be called ‘the usual suspects’: archivists, academics, teachers; often older, female, middle-class. But across the 5000 diaries, a broad range of voices can be found. To ensure this broad range of voices appeared in the book, I sampled 500 of the diaries, filling quotas for age group, gender, region of the UK, and occupational category. This gave me plenty of ‘unusual suspects’: carers, chaplains, cleaners, company directors, customs officers, delivery drivers, diplomats, doctors, electricians, engineers, farmers, finance managers, hairdressers, midwives, nurses, painters and decorators, sales assistants, schoolchildren… Also, when considering the question of representativeness, we need to ask what determined someone’s position during the pandemic. Demographic characteristics clearly played a role, but so did other factors, such as having a mother whose dementia got worse during the pandemic, or having a father living away from home due to his job as a doctor, his close contact with Covid patients, and his reluctance to put his family at risk by returning home after shifts at the hospital.

Diarists were instructed by the archive to anonymise their diaries. Because of this, many of the diaries submitted are seemingly frank and honest accounts of how the pandemic was affecting the diarists and their families, friends, and workplaces. They are also generally observant, containing plenty of details about everyday life during the pandemic; and reflective, containing plenty of interpretation – of events, thoughts, and feelings prompted by the pandemic. The diaries are focused on just one day (a Tuesday towards the end of the spring 2020 lockdown), but many of the diaries look backwards over previous months, and forwards to what the future might hold. Together, the diaries capture much of everyday life in the pandemic for millions of people in the UK and elsewhere: the activities, events, and rituals (e.g. funerals or home schooling); the sites and stages (e.g. shops or zoom); the roles and subject positions (e.g. ‘key workers’ or ‘vulnerable people’); the frames (e.g. luck or the ‘new normal’); and the moods (e.g. fear or hope).

If one challenge I faced when writing the book was how to select diaries from the 5000 (the statistical challenge of representativeness), then another was how to present extracts from the selected diaries (the aesthetic challenge of representation). To address this latter challenge, I took guidance from other attempts to narrate pandemics (Defoe, Camus, Grover, Spinney…). I learned from these other attempts to keep the scope wide (to include multiple portraits from multiple communities); to include details that communicate experience (both novel and mundane); and to use this combination – scope plus detail – to refuse myths of the pandemic and the society it impacted. I also took guidance from other attempts to present everyday life (Joyce, Woolf, Mass-Observation, Jennings, Benjamin, Alexievich, Perec, Barthes, Gumbrecht, Pile & Thrift…). Here, I learned to avoid humanistic cliché by including: events, actions, thoughts, and feelings; sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures; multiple voices and perspectives; the familiar and the strange; contradictions and paradoxes. To accommodate all this, and to put the reader there, I learned: to limit the focus on just one day or place; to use devices from Surrealism (fragments, montage, juxtaposition); to use devices from encyclopedias (entries, alphabetised sequencing, cross-references); to present instead of representing, to show instead of telling, to ‘let quotes constitute the main work’ (after Arendt on Benjamin).

All this gave me a book topped and tailed with essays on how to narrate pandemics (the introductory chapter) and how to present everyday life (the concluding chapter), but made up for the most part by diary extracts arranged in encyclopedia entries: anxiety; birdsong; cancellations; clap for carers; deliveries; fear; funerals; furlough; gratitude; grief; guilt; home schooling; hope; key workers; lockdown projects; luck; (new) normal; PE (Physical Education); shielding; shops; stay alert; stay apart; stay home; (dog) walking; WhatsApp; working from home; Zoom.

The resulting book could be criticised as a cacophony. Readers may ask: what’s the point? Where’s the politics? My response is that a democratic politics informs the book. It seeks to be a democratic account of the pandemic that gives a range of people voice, captures elements missing from summary accounts, and encourages new connections, ideas and questions. It also seeks to be a humanising account that presents society as complex, diverse, and eccentric; that undercuts myths of ‘the people’ and encourages a modest, careful engagement with others. In my own moments of immodesty, I like to see the book as a model for a revived ‘science of the people, by the people, for the people’ (once attempted by the original Mass-Observation): a research programme studying people from every walk of life, in which people are mobilised as writers (about their own lives) and readers (of writing by others); through which people might be mobilised as democratic, humanised, modest, careful publics.

I’ve managed to get to the end of this summary without providing example extracts from the diaries. To do so would not be in the spirit of the book, where the scope is meant to be wide, the voices are meant to be multiple, and the quotations are meant to be fragments juxtaposed within a montage. Having said that, I have a book to sell. So just as I started this summary with some transcribed reviews, I’ll finish with some transcribed diary extracts. Before that, let me just mention a few acknowledgements. The book grew out of research for a project funded by the British Academy (Special Research Grant COV19\200422). It is dedicated to Clive Barnett, who was my co-investigator on that project, my dear friend, and who died suddenly in December 2021. I’m grateful to the trustees of the Mass Observation Archive for permission to use the diaries and publish extracts from them, and the archivists of the MOA – especially Jessica Scantlebury and Kirsty Pattrick – for their expert assistance while sampling and reading the diaries. I’m grateful to Ben Highmore, Annebella Pollen, and James Hinton for providing comments on early drafts of the book, and to the team at Bloomsbury – commissioning editor Rhodri Mogford, series editors Jennifer Purcell and Benjamin Jones, two anonymous reviewers, and the production team.

Anxiety

Diarist 1692 (female, 60s, North of England, retired teacher)

Tonight I have a slight cold which immediately makes me worry as to whether I have got Covid. I don’t have any underlying health conditions but I do worry about dying. I have started to write family stories for my granddaughter and daughters.

Birdsong

Diarist 3552 (female, 13, Scotland)

My mum, my dad and I went for a walk along a lovely canal that we lived really near to. I have been following the journey of a female swan that has been nesting further up the canal since the start of the lockdown. My mum and I have been going daily to see when the eggs would hatch. As we neared the nest my eyes practically burst out of my head! Inside the nest, lying next to their mother, were four incredibly fluffy and cute cygnets! I was ecstatic! […] I walked home very happy […] In bed, I thought about how I would normally never have had enough time to see the swans every day, and I would never have known the cygnets existed! At least that is one good thing that has come out of lockdown!

Cancellations

Diarist 1289 (female, 50s, South East England, creative producer and artistic director)

I’m feeling down because I spoke to my Mum & Dad, via Skype, last night. My Mum has vascular dementia & was doing pretty well, visiting a day centre twice a week & lots of lunches, coffees etc. with friends. That’s obviously all stopped since the lock down […] Mum was really struggling to express herself & get her thoughts & words out; couldn’t put a story together or focus on a train of thought. It’s a devastating drop in 8 weeks!

              I obviously knew it was coming, but here it is & I’m completely powerless to help […] Today I’m imagining that maybe I’ve already hugged her for the last time. It’s devastating.

Deliveries

Diarist 989 (female, 60s, retired)

A book arrives in the post. We treat it with caution. Should we put it aside for three days until any virus on the packaging is dead?

Fear

Diarist 200 (female, 30s, London, visual designer)

Mum is classed as vulnerable […] And my little sister seems likely to be back at work in June […] I’m so scared and sad and concerned for my family’s future, more than my own right now. I found myself in a moment yesterday where I didn’t even know how to feel anymore. I sat in the bath and cried so hard I couldn’t breathe.

Funerals

Diarist 4269 (female, 20s, South East England, editor)

Tuesday 12th May was the date of my grampy’s burial. He […] died from Covid […] in a care home […] When it became clear that he had just a few hours left to live, the care home said that a family member could briefly visit […] My granny couldn’t go because of her age and the associated risk of contracting Covid […] My brother, a trainee GP, is exposed to the virus anyway through work so went on behalf of the family […] We were given permission to have a very small, brief, open air burial on 12th May. [Sister and I] pulled up in the car park next to the church at 2.00 and my aunties and their families were already there in their cars […] At 2.15 we got out and said hello to each other, kind of awkwardly and warily, keeping much more than 2 metres apart […] My nurse sister and my brother and his fiancé stood (separately) much further than 2m away from everyone, given their close contact with Covid patients at work […] After the service, we all stood around at the edge of the common and talked for a bit […] We let the dog out of the car so that my nurse sister could hug her, since she didn’t have another person to comfort her.

Furlough

Diarist 2707 (female, 40s, South East England, painter and decorator)

I am a self-employed Painter and Decorator, and during this Covid lockdown I am unable to work due to the social distancing restrictions. This means I am spending my days much more leisurely than I have ever done since being of a working age! Even with the restrictions of not travelling or socialising in person, this time feels like the freedom of the long summer school holidays of my childhood!

Gratitude

Diarist 3761 (female, 30s, South West England, lawyer)

I return to study at my desk. I enjoy the view of our garden […] and I feel grateful that I have my health and the support of my fiancé to get me through this bizarre time. I keep reminding myself that I have so much and that I shouldn’t feel downtrodden by the weight of the whole global crisis […] I also remind myself that although we have had to cancel our wedding because of the pandemic, there are far worse problems in the world to have […] But I also allow myself a little cry or feel a fraction of self-pity at times just because I think maybe it’s ok to grieve over the carefully laid plans that have been unravelled.

Grief

Diarist 759 (male, 30s, East Midlands, student)

I have recently become a widower as my wife passed away from Covid 19 […] Like the last four weeks since my wife died I wake up either thinking that she is still alive or knowing that she is dead. I wake up and already everything is different, not like it was in March, no one to ask me how I slept and I them, no one to ask if they would like a cup of tea […] Today I changed my routine of the last few weeks and showered and got dressed. Something very weird about having a shower, it instantly makes you cry. I’ve never cried so much in my life since she’s died. Sometimes it is silent tears, sometimes howling and sometimes I just want to shout at the top of my lungs […] After I’ve had my shower I walk through into our living room, past the urn containing my wife’s ashes […] I think the thing about my Tuesday is that I never expected I’d be a widower sitting here in the middle of a lock down, not really knowing where my future will lead […] I wanted to talk about my older brother, my younger sister, parents, other family, friends and interests but my life has taken a devastating turn and so I need to share about the truths of living after someone dying of Covid 19.

…

Interview with History of the Human Sciences

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I did an interview with History of the Human Sciences about a special section we edited on ‘Archiving the COVID-19 Pandemic in Mass Observation and Middletown’. The interview can be found here: https://www.histhum.com/interview-archiving-the-covid-19-pandemic/. The issue it refers to (36.2) can be found here: https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/hhsa/36/2.

Archiving the COVID-19 pandemic in Mass Observation and Middletown

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The second and third articles from this project have just been published in History of the Human Sciences (Volume 36, Issue 2; see https://doi.org/10.1177/09526951231152139 and https://doi.org/10.1177/09526951231170574). They should be open access. Here are the abstracts:

Archiving the COVID-19 pandemic in Mass Observation and Middletown

The COVID-19 pandemic generated debates about how pandemics should be known. There was much discussion of what role the human sciences could play in knowing – and governing – the pandemic. In this article, we focus on attempts to know the pandemic through diaries, other biographical writing, and related forms like mass photography. In particular, we focus on the archiving of such forms by Mass Observation in the UK and the Everyday Life in Middletown (EDLM) project in the USA, and initial analyses of such material by scholars from across the human sciences. Our main argument is that archiving the pandemic was informed by, and needs viewing through, the history of the human sciences – including the distinctive histories and human sciences of Mass Observation and Middletown. The article finishes by introducing a Special Section that engages with archiving the pandemic in two senses: the archiving of diaries and related forms by Mass Observation and the EDLM project, and the archiving of initial encounters between researchers and this material by History of the Human Sciences. The Special Section seeks to know the pandemic from the human sciences in the present and to archive knowing the pandemic from the human sciences for the future.

Seeing like an epidemiologist? Mobilising people against COVID-19

Diaries and other materials in the Mass Observation Archive have been characterised as intersubjective and dialogic. They have been used to study top-down and bottom-up processes, including how ordinary people respond to sociological constructs and, more broadly, the footprint of social science in the 20th century. In this article, we use the Archive’s COVID-19 collections to study how attempts to govern the pandemic by mobilising ordinary people to see like an epidemiologist played out in the United Kingdom during 2020. People were asked to think in terms of populations and groups; rates, trends, and distributions; the capacity of public services; and complex systems of causation. How did they respond? How did they use the statistics, charts, maps, concepts, identities, and roles they were given? We find evidence of engagement with science plural; confident and comfortable engagement with epidemiological terms and concepts; sceptical and reluctant engagement with epidemiological subject positions; use of both scientific and moral literacy to negotiate regulations and guidance; and use of scientific literacy to compare and judge government performance. Governing the pandemic through scientific literacy was partially successful, but in some unexpected ways.

CFP: Clive Barnett’s Geographies

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RGS-IBG Annual Conference, 29 Aug to 1 Sept 2023, London

Convenors: Nick Clarke (University of Southampton) and Felicity Callard (University of Glasgow)

Clive Barnett died suddenly in December 2021. We’d like to organise a session at the RGS-IBG Annual Conference bringing together Clive’s friends, colleagues, and interlocutors to remember him, to celebrate his life and work, and to discuss his contribution to geographical thought. To that end, we invite expressions of interest for contributions to the session. These might be reflections on working with Clive, discussions of texts he wrote, developments of ideas he promoted, or papers inspired by his work. We are open to other suggestions. The format(s) will depend on the response we receive. We can request a maximum of two timeslots. We can request a hybrid format, allowing some participants to join in London and others to join online (subject to approval from the conference organisers). We’ll probably describe the session as a ‘panel discussion’, but we are flexible regarding number of panellists and length of contributions. Depending on the response we receive, it is possible the session will lead to a special issue or edited book on Clive Barnett’s geographies. For now, please send expressions of interest, including author names and affiliations, titles and abstracts (250 words max.), and any details regarding the format of contribution you would like to make to n.clarke@soton.ac.uk and felicity.callard@glasgow.ac.uk by 24 February.

Beyond compliance: Good citizenship during the COVID-19 pandemic

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I’ve spent 2022 writing up three papers Clive and I discussed during 2021. The first of these has just been published in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (see http://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12587). The article should be open access. Here is the abstract:

In the UK, discussion of good citizenship during the COVID-19 pandemic largely focused on compliance and non-compliance with government rules. In this article, we offer an alternative point of focus. Pandemic governance proceeded not only through rules/morality, but also through freedom/ethics. Good citizenship, therefore, involved practical reasoning in response to situations. We demonstrate this using diaries and other forms of writing collected by Mass Observation during the first six months of the pandemic. Responses to government rules and guidance varied by situation. Many people found governance through freedom/ethics confusing and burdensome. Faced by ethical dilemmas, they managed risks and responsibilities by deliberating, weighing justifications, and sometimes falling back on rules of thumb or heuristics. Discussion of good citizenship during future emergencies would benefit from a greater focus on situations, dilemmas, and justifications.

How do people respond to public health measures? Ordinary ethics during the COVID-19 pandemic

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Clive and I wrote this on 22 December. We agreed to post it in January, when people would be back on Twitter, so that is what I’m doing. The post summarises a full-length paper we submitted for review in mid-December.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been presented as a biopolitical event that extends and transforms neoliberal modes of surveilling and governing the conditions of life and death. Consistent with such a view, debates about the efficacy of public health strategies during the pandemic – non-pharmaceutical policy interventions aimed at changing behaviours e.g. rules or guidelines on handwashing, wearing face coverings, social distancing, self-isolating – have often focused on the problem of compliance: whether people are complying, and will continue to comply, with rules and guidelines.

One starting point for this post was a concern that such framings obscure how people might navigate public issues using practical reasoning; how people might respond to the pandemic less with compliance or resistance, and more by enacting their ordinary capacities for ethical action. Our thinking, here, is informed by writing on the anthropology of ethics by people like Michael Lambek, Veena Das, and Didier Fassin, and especially the idea of ordinary ethics. In this field, the ethical refers to those dimensions of action in which dilemmas, cares, and predicaments are experienced as problems of how to exercise freedom in accountable and responsible ways. The ethical arises, therefore, not only in extraordinary, dramatic moments requiring explicit, deliberative judgement, but also in practices of everyday life, which are scenes of negotiation, riven by dilemmas, doubts, threats, and vulnerabilities.

To trace the forms of practical reasoning used by people responding to public health measures during the pandemic, we analysed a sample of biographical writing – diaries, letters, and other forms – collected by the Mass Observation Archive (MOA) from thousands of residents of the United Kingdom. Here is an example extract from the beginning of one diary, kept on 12th May 2020:

Today my husband and I are arguing about whether he can play golf or not. The government advice is that they can play in pairs but he has also been told he is still shielding […] He does not feel that going to play golf on his own and having no contact with anyone is going to increase his risk […] I want him to be able to enjoy his sport but I feel worried about the risks. It felt easier when no-one could play golf or travel or work. Now there is so much to navigate and so much to decide. My mum is already talking about me visiting them again. But it is 200 miles by train […] and that exposes me to a whole lot of risk. ‘But what is our exit plan?’ my husband asks. I am somehow expected to know, to somehow be the grown up in all of this. He seems to expect me to set the rules for him and yet he doesn’t really want that. I no longer know what to say to him about it all. ‘Yes it is unfair that you cannot go out and yes it is unfair that your asthma means you may not recover if you get the virus and yes I’d feel very guilty if I was to bring the virus home.’

In this extract, ‘compliance’ is rendered conditional on maintaining personal relationships. The diarist felt under pressure to manage both risks to herself on public transport and responsibilities to her mother (demanding a visit). She felt responsible for protecting her shielding husband and guilty for numerous things, from stopping him enjoying his sport in the present, to potentially bringing the virus home in the future. Her concerns included not only managing her own and family members’ exposure to risk from interactions in public spaces, but also how she or they might be a risk to others.

In general, we analysed sources in the MOA for grammars of responsibility: the ways that people discuss publically circulated moral codes; reason about whether and how to follow rules and recommendations; reason about what is justifiable and practicable; and give content and meaning to public discourses in ways that align with existing concerns and commitments. In doing so, we found a discourse of uncertainty. Many people were confused about government rules and guidance. This opened up space for reflection on what might count as binding for particular individuals in particular situations. We also found that prescriptions and guidance generated a series of dilemmas for many people. The right thing to do was therefore rendered subject to forms of judgement regarding the balancing of multiple demands and values.

Pandemic response, we conclude, was not simply a question of compliance or non-compliance. It was experienced ethically. Abstract regulations had to be interpreted, given content, and made meaningful in practical terms and in terms of what matters. These conclusions help to advance understandings of how people responded to public health measures during the COVID-19 pandemic, but also, more generally, how ordinary people engage with public issues.

Geographies of generosity: Remembering Clive Barnett

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This blog, and the project behind it, is (was) a collaboration between Clive Barnett and myself. Clive died on 24 December 2021. I’ll work out what this means for the project in the coming weeks and months. For now, here are some words on Clive:

This is not a formal obituary. There will be other times, places, and authors for those. It will probably get trapped in the obituary genre though, which is disappointing because Clive was always trying to escape the constraints of particular genres, which he thought limited our ability to think about new things in new ways. (I realise I’m going to make some claims about what Clive thought in the coming paragraphs. In writing this piece, I don’t mean to claim him from others. There was enough of Clive to go round. And anyone who wants to know what Clive really thought can read all the wonderful writing he left us).

If this is not a formal obituary, then it also won’t be as insightful as some of the informal, genre-defying ‘obituaries’ Clive himself wrote. He wrote generously about many former colleagues, helping people to remember them and see their work in often new and inspiring ways. Some of these pieces were published over the years on his Pop Theory blog. I’m not sure how to put this, but I was ‘looking forward’ (the wrong words) to reading more of these posts about certain human geographers in future. Now, some of those people will presumably write about Clive instead.

What follows will also be written in a strange voice (to me). I don’t really know my audience anymore. For much of my academic life, one prominent member of my imagined audience was Clive. I wrote for him, hoping he would like what I wrote. Sometimes we wrote together, co-authoring a book, journal articles, blog posts etc. or he acted as a second reader for papers I was writing alone or with others. But even when he wasn’t an actual reader, I always imagined he was. He was the standard I held myself to, though he probably wouldn’t have liked that idea. Too constraining again. Standards were for interrogating.

I met Clive at Bristol in the early 2000s. As a PhD student, I joined his ‘big hard books’ reading group, in which he helped students – and some colleagues – read books like The Limits to Capital and A Theory of Justice from cover to cover, including footnotes, one chapter per week. He was very generous with his time and advice. I had my own supportive, inspiring PhD supervisor in Nigel Thrift, but Clive also read things for me, including my draft thesis, which he covered in thousands of markings – providing possibly the closest reading by anyone of anything I’ve ever written.

After my PhD, I became Clive’s research assistant on a project with Paul Cloke and Alice Malpass. This project, led by Clive, taught me a huge amount. Of course, I learned something of theory, which is what Clive is perhaps best known for, and which he was comfortable identifying with (as Professor of Geography and Social Theory at University of Exeter). But I also learned much about empirical research, which Clive took incredibly seriously. In our conversations over the years, he would talk about empirical studies – say, the political geography of Ron Johnston or Charles Pattie – at least as often as the philosophers and theorists with whom he is often associated (Marx, Foucault, Derrida, Habermas etc.). To see how seriously Clive took empirical research, I recommend Chapter 5 of Globalizing Responsibility. The first draft was, I recall, well over 20,000 words. It was mostly Clive and remains one of the deepest engagements I’ve read with questions of what focus groups are for and how to interpret focus group data. (Clive’s line was that focus groups allow researchers to stage aspects of democratic governance. Group members position themselves and others in relation to public issues. This happens interactively and dynamically over the course of the session. Using focus groups, researchers get to observe this process of positioning and repositioning.)

Something else Clive taught me during our study of ethical consumption was the importance of description. It is never ‘mere’ description. It is the foundation for analysis. Indeed, one of Clive’s irritations with certain strains of critical geography was that too often, he thought, critics jump too quickly from description to analysis to denunciation, without pausing for long enough to describe and understand, to describe thickly, what they think they are denouncing.

For example, when we began the ethical consumption project, critical commentators generally assumed that campaigns – promoting consumption of products that were fair trade, no sweat, organic etc. – aimed to subjectify people (as ethical consumers). They proceeded to dismiss these campaigns, either for failing to achieve their aims (because subjectification meets resistance) or for aiming to achieve politically suspect aims (the encouragement of consumer identities and practices). Clive wanted to look more carefully at such campaigns, with a clear lens and an open mind – relatively speaking, of course. When he did so, what he described were campaigns aiming to generate acts of ethical consumption (e.g. sales of fair trade products) that would then be used as evidence of support for a policy position (e.g. fair trade) in multiple arenas – from the church stall to the supermarket to the local council to the government department to the international trade conference.

Reading back what I’ve written so far, one emergent theme is generosity: Clive’s generosity to me personally (giving me his time, feedback, advice, friendship); and his generosity to the people he studied – campaigners, citizens, politicians, scientists, ordinary people, who he approached generally as good faith actors operating competently in difficult circumstances. Another example of Clive’s generosity is the way he interacted with academic colleagues – in team meetings, seminars, conference sessions, written exchanges. His usual way was to listen to people and pick out the one thing he liked best (even if he disliked lots of what they said). Then he would riff on that one thing, making more of it, and making the person feel good for having triggered such positive, productive engagement. (Of course, Clive could also be a harsh critic, as anyone who’s read his book reviews or blog posts about UK HE will attest, but I think he pretty much exclusively reserved such harshness for people ‘at the top’. If he was punchy on occasion, then he punched up and not down.)

After Bristol, Clive and I kept in touch. He moved to the Open University – which fitted his commitments to the competence of ordinary people and their place in democracy (on which more below) – then to Exeter. We did favours for each other, reading things each other had written, speaking at things organised by each other. He wrote references for me and provided advice – always the senior partner. Indeed, writing a difficult piece like this, Clive is the first person I would have called for advice…

For the last 18 months or so, we’ve been working together more formally again as co-investigators on a project about popular responses to the COVID-19 pandemic (this blog is the website for that project). The excitement for me was working once more with Clive and his original, always provocative ideas on risk, responsibility, ethics, governmentality, practices, ordinary people. The excitement for Clive was working again on something empirical: the diaries and letters collected during the pandemic by the Mass Observation Archive. He worried that critics were publishing too many quick analyses of the pandemic. They were fitting the pandemic into their existing frameworks. They were doing what Lauren Berlant called ‘genre flailing’: not opening up the object of study, but closing it down, controlling it, stabilising it, putting it to rest by throwing the language and interpretations of normal science at it. They were jumping from thin description to analysis (and often denunciation) without first patiently trying to describe and understand. Clive wanted to be moved by the pandemic. This was the potential he saw in the Mass Observation materials we’ve been reading. And while I was pushing us quickly to get something relevant out there, to intervene in public debates about how the pandemic was being governed and narrated, he was always pulling us back, determined to do justice to this new phenomenon and its effects, not to reduce it, not to dismiss elements of it, not to do epistemic violence to those affected by it.

Clive could be frustrating to work with. He was slow – intentionally so. He was controlling – often rewriting every other word of drafts written by co-authors. He was over-committed on lots of different projects (including his own projects like Pop Theory, which he could get lost in for days when other deadlines were due, but which were substantial, like everything he did). The frustrations, of course, were worth it. The papers and books that emerged were worth reading. I worry now about my current project. Some of what will come out of it will be my reductive hot takes, naked and exposed, lacking Clive’s care, patience, rigour, scholarship. He never would have let the hastily written piece you’re currently reading out the door. How I wish I could still check in with him before hitting ‘send’!

The final word, for now, should probably be ‘democracy’. Clive worked on this topic throughout his career. His views on democracy – his belief in people, giving them voice, enabling participation, listening, deliberating – run through so much of the above. He read widely (across the disciplines and continents). He listened carefully – to colleagues, but also ordinary people, whether in focus groups, the Mass Observation Archive, or popular culture, including the pop music he loved and insisted should be taken as seriously as the most radical punk act or obscure indie band. He refused to accept that ordinary people were dupes or victims – less competent or skilled than himself, other academics, journalists, politicians. This was part of his problem with critiques of neoliberalism. For him, at least some of these critiques assumed a top-down project of deregulation for the benefit of the capitalist class, and so wrote out the agency of ordinary people who benefited from the welfare state during the twentieth century, became more competent and critical over time, and came to demand a more active role in governance – a process Clive and others termed ‘democratisation’. More recently, Clive’s determination to recognise the good faith and competence of ordinary people was partly behind his irritation with critiques of the post-political. Some of them assumed, in Clive’s view, another top-down project of depoliticisation. How could such a project ever succeed, even if there was such a project? Would it not mean that ordinary people had stopped caring about things; had stopped suffering injustices and acting on the basis of those injustices – voicing their grievances, mobilising, making demands – in the same way you or I would?

In his reading, listening, and writing, Clive practised a democratic geography with great integrity. He is gone way too soon. Indeed, I can’t believe he is gone. After writing this piece, I had to go through and edit all the tenses. It is hard to write in the past tense about someone who was present until a couple of days ago. Clive leaves us (left us) this example of democratic academic practice and also a large body of writing – on democracy, South African democracy, human geography, social theory, and so much more – that deserves to be read long into the future.

So there is the conventional ending to the academic obituary. Let me also say that I loved him and know I’m one of many, many heart-broken people today.

Everyday life in the COVID-19 pandemic: Full set of videos now available

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During 2021, supported by the British Academy, we collaborated with Jessica Scantlebury and Kirsty Pattrick at the Mass Observation Archive (MOA) to organise a seminar series on everyday life in the COVID-19 pandemic.

Over six months, 16 papers were presented by 20 speakers from universities, archives, and think tanks in the UK, elsewhere in Europe, and the USA. The 95 registered audience members were spread across these locations and more.

Some of the speakers focused specifically on Mass Observation’s COVID-19 collections, contextualising them in the history of Mass Observation and everyday life studies, interpreting them for what they tell us about everyday life in the UK during the pandemic, and discussing the methodological challenges of using these collections. Other talks focused on other pandemic diary projects and collections – including the Lothian Diary Project, the Young Foundation’s COVID-19 and Community Life project, and the Everyday Life in Middletown Project – and other qualitative research projects completed during the pandemic. Themes covered by the talks included: the ethics of presenting everyday life; time and temporality; fear; uncertainty; the experiences of women; mobility; and social infrastructure.

Six videos covering the full series of talks can be found on Mass Observation’s YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHab2Tt38DJF9GS_z3lwzV1YJIBqjCLI6.

Video 1

Nick Clarke (University of Southampton) – Some lessons from the literature.

Claire Langhamer (University of Sussex) – Mass-Observing the pandemic.

Kirsty Pattrick (University of Sussex) and Jessica Scantlebury (University of Sussex) – Mass Observation’s Covid-19 collections.

Video 2

Ben Highmore (University of Sussex) – The observation by everyone of everyone.

Nick Hubble (Brunel University London) – Self-reflexive writing, everyday life and social change in Mass Observation narratives.

Video 3

Mathew Thomson (University of Warwick) – Reflections on the histories of Covid, mental health and the NHS via Mass Observation.

Dawn Lyon (University of Kent) and Rebecca Coleman (Goldsmiths) – Making time and feeling time: Temporal orientations to the coronavirus pandemic.

Clive Barnett (University of Exeter) – Fearful practices: Temporalities of anxiety and anticipation during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Video 4

Perpetua Kirby (University of Sussex) and Rebecca Webb (University of Sussex) – Covid-19 and educating for uncertainty.

Annebella Pollen (University of Brighton) – Picturing the pandemic in Mass Observation’s Covid collections.

Kirsty Pattrick (University of Sussex) – Women, wellbeing, and the natural environment during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Video 5

Claire Cowie (University of Edinburgh) – The Lothian Diary Project.

Victoria Boelman (The Young Foundation) – Covid-19 & Community Life: A creative digital diary approach to understanding community life during a global pandemic.

Patrick Collier (Ball State University) and James Connolly (Ball State University) – Time shifts: Future orientation in pandemic everyday life.

Video 6

Mary Greene (Wageningen University) – Consumption and shifting temporalities of daily life during disruption: Undoing and reassembling household practices during COVID-19.

Anna-Lisa Mueller (Bielefeld University) – Social infrastructures in times of Corona: Exploring the ambiguities of sociality, practices and materiality through collaborative autoethnography.

Using Mass Observation’s COVID-19 collections: Videos of the seminar series

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The seminar series runs from May to November 2021. For more more information on the seminar series, please see https://covidresponsibility.org/2021/04/26/using-mass-observations-covid-19-collections-seminar-schedule/. The video of the first seminar is now available. The playlist for videos of all the seminars can be found on Mass Observation’s YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHab2Tt38DJF9GS_z3lwzV1YJIBqjCLI6.

Using Mass Observation’s Covid-19 Collections: Seminar Schedule

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Here is the schedule for this online seminar series. The seminars will be on Wednesday afternoons, 1400-1600 GMT. If you’d like to receive joining instructions, please e-mail n.clarke@soton.ac.uk. The organisers are Nick Clarke (University of Southampton) and Clive Barnett (University of Exeter), with Kirsty Pattrick and Jessica Scantlebury (Mass Observation Archive). We thank the British Academy for providing funding (Special Research Grant: Covid-19 – ‘Learning to Live with Risk and Responsibility: Understanding Popular Responses to Covid-19’ – see https://covidresponsibility.org).

May 19th – Introduction

Nick Clarke (University of Southampton) and Clive Barnett (University of Exeter) – Some lessons from the literature.

Claire Langhamer (University of Sussex) – Mass-Observing the pandemic.

Kirsty Pattrick (University of Sussex) and Jessica Scantlebury (University of Sussex) – Mass Observation’s Covid-19 collections.

June 16th – Situating the Covid-19 collections in MO

Ben Highmore (University of Sussex) – The observation by everyone of everyone.

Nick Hubble (Brunel University London) – Self-reflexive writing, everyday life and social change in Mass Observation narratives.

July 14th – Using MO’s Covid-19 collections 1

Mathew Thomson (University of Warwick) – Reflections on the histories of Covid, mental health and the NHS via Mass Observation.

Dawn Lyon (University of Kent) and Rebecca Coleman (Goldsmiths) – Making time and feeling time: Temporal orientations to the coronavirus pandemic.

Clive Barnett (University of Exeter) and Nick Clarke (University of Southampton) – Further lessons from the archive.

September 15th – Using MO’s Covid-19 collections 2

Perpetua Kirby (University of Sussex) and Rebecca Webb (University of Sussex) – Covid-19 and educating for uncertainty.

Annebella Pollen (University of Brighton) – Picturing the pandemic in Mass Observation’s Covid collections.

Kirsty Pattrick (University of Sussex) – Women, wellbeing, and the natural environment during the Covid-19 pandemic.

October 13th – Beyond MO: Other journals of the plague year

Claire Cowie (University of Edinburgh, with: Lauren Hall-Lew, Beatrice Alex, Nini Fang, Catherine Lai, Sarah Liu, Nina Markl, and Stephen McNulty, University of Edinburgh) – The Lothian Diary Project.

Victoria Boelman (The Young Foundation) – Covid-19 & Community Life: A creative digital diary approach to understanding community life during a global pandemic.

Patrick Collier (Ball State University) and James Connolly (Ball State University) – Time shifts: Future orientation in pandemic everyday life.

November 10th – Beyond the UK: Other qualitative studies of lockdown

Katja Sara Pepe de Neergaard (IT University of Copenhagen) – Privacy as digital wellbeing: The relationship between privacy practices and digital wellbeing during lockdown.

Mary Greene (Wageningen University, with: Arve Hansen, University of Oslo; Claire Hoolohan, Manchester University; Elisabeth Süßbauer, TU Berlin; and Lorenzo Domaneschi, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca) – Consumption and shifting temporalities of daily life during disruption: Undoing and reassembling household practices during COVID-19.

Leonie Tuitjer (Leibniz University Hanover) and Anna-Lisa Mueller (Osnabruck University) – Social infrastructures in times of Corona: Exploring the ambiguities of sociality, practices and materiality through collaborative autoethnography.