The spread of COVID‐19 acutely challenges and affects not just economic markets, demographic statistics and healthcare systems, but indeed also the politics of organizing and becoming in a new everyday life of academia emerging in our homes. Through a collage of stories, snapshots, vignettes, photos and other reflections of everyday life, this collective contribution is catching a glimpse of corona‐life and its micro‐politics of multiple, often contradicting claims on practices as many of us live, work and care at home. It embodies concerns, dreams, anger, hope, numbness, passion and much more emerging amongst academics from across the world in response to the crisis. As such, this piece manifests a shared need to — together, apart — enact and explore constitutive relations of resistance, care and solidarity in these dis/organizing times of contested spaces, identities and agencies as we are living–working–caring at home during lockdowns.

This essay seeks to add to a growing awareness of transgender lives and narratives in management and organisational studies. It presents an often visceral and emotive autoethnographical account of the experience of being a non-binary transsexual in the United Kingdom to question whether it is possible to think gender without invoking the heterosexual matrix and being held to account by it. It also asks what may need to be done so that the abject and marginalised in society may have liveable lives rather than an otherwise unliveable life resulting from that matrix. It argues that transgender is often conflated in management research theoretically as queer or queer's evil twin where the latter concept reduces trans lives to rigid, polarised positions in the matrix and stereotypes. The essay concludes by asking an open question, how we may organise so as to make lives liveable?

Worldwide, the COVID-19 pandemic has had a devastating impact on prisoners. The prison environment and prisoner health put prison populations at a higher risk of contracting COVID-19. As a result, prison systems have adopted mitigation strategies to reduce the transmission of the virus into and within prisons. These strategies, however, have had an unintended impact on prisoners and their living conditions. In this article, we explore prisoners’ lived experiences of the pandemic in English and Welsh prisons, captured through correspondence with prisoners throughout 12 months of regime restrictions, from April 2020 to April 2021. Drawing on prisoner narratives, the analysis reveals how the restricted regime has exacerbated the pains of imprisonment and had a detrimental impact on prisoners.

In this essay, I would like to ask if we are concerned with writing about difference or writing differently. I attempt to present an account of my ongoing experience of dysphoria and consider how I write about that experience. I reveal how my writing has no epiphany, is repetitive and in its characterless depiction of others is a two-dimensional, monologue that fails the conventions of an evocative autoethnographic account. My writing is 'bad writing' but what should become of it? Does a concern with style, whether or not over content, based on taste preclude some stories and different ways of writing? Should I be excluded from academe and silenced, or can room be found for a tasteless account like mine? I end my essay by provocatively owning the label of bad writing.

From Chess to Queergaming: 'Play'ing with and disrupting heteronormative assumptions in the performance of gender and sexual orientationThe conceptual framework presented in this paper draws on metaphors of 'Game' and 'Play' to illustrate how tacit and invisible heteronormative assumptions and gendered power dynamics pervade organizations. In this way it illuminates how such assumptions and restrictions impact and marginalize LGBTQ* people that do not conform to heteronormativity. Using metaphors of Chess and MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games), the paper explores limits of prescriptive dualistic understandings of gender and sexual orientation, specifically from the perspective of lesbian women, as basis for disruption and to start opening space for LGBTQ* difference through queergaming.We argue that the concepts presented are a useful vehicle to increase inclusivity within HRD research and examine its practices more critically. In doing so, the paper seeks to answer calls from within the field of critical human resource development (critical HRD) to diversify HRD scholarship by expanding and challenging prevalent notions of heteronormativity.

Cutting my dick off This essay considers how transgender and non-conforming people and their bodies are medically organised in society by surgery. The surgical normalisation of these bodies is not however enough for some in society. 'Once a man, always a man' claim those who oppose and abuse TGNC people and the UK daily press, radio and on TV routinely encourage and facilitate this abuse. This essay focuses on themes of genitalia, tattoos, self-harm, self-mutilation and auto-castration to understand how and why society and medical practices seem to be obsessed with normalising bodies. It does so in relation to one body, that of a non-binary individual. That body is my own and it is my hope that this essay will open up and add to literature on trans folk in organizational discourse whilst also introducing the issues of gender dysphoria and 'self-mutilation' as themes for further organizational research and debate. Bodies and flesh; self-mutilation; tattoos; auto-castration; transgender and non-binary.

This article is a messy account not of the COVID‐19 pandemic but one written during the pandemic. Although written over several successive evenings it is not a linear narrative that builds on a chain of passing moments teleologically to an end. It is not a diary, just a collection of scattered thoughts about living during COVID‐19, the (lack of) care that many elderly people receive and how we, or perhaps only I, struggle to cope in these exceptional times. This is not a typical autoethnography, it is not reflexive writing and there is no conclusion albeit that the article ends.

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