Zooming in on COVID

Abstract

This article is a result of the way in which the design of a first-year anthropology course attempted to undo stern structural hierarchies between students and teachers. Instead, the participants regarded one another as fellow anthropologists undertaking ethnographic research on the university context. This article examines the intimate relations that came available to participants when the course moved from in-person to Zoom format. Participants moved into homes to document the unfurling COVID-19 crisis, (back) into intimate familial relations. But this was not the only intimacy with which participants had to grapple anthropologically. The lecture materials, too, connected themselves to things and experiences in immediacy as they arrived into homes through laptop screens. The screens themselves offered up new insights into the lives of others – something newly minted anthropologists had to account for as they completed the course.

Transforming perception of space in the pandemic agenda: from real space to virtual space

“…The fact that there is no border between the public and the personal spaces reveals the need to keep the area scanned by the camera separate from the personal. COVID-19, as a visitor that would not be turned out, had arrived via a Zoom screen, was transmitted via lecturer invitations to see temporalities, objects, and relations as an anthropologist might result in the immediacy of their own homes (Roth et al, 2021). The study revealed that when a person is uncomfortable with sharing about oneself or self possessions, he/ she pays attention to his/her choices within the camera angle, as described below.…”

The Ethnographic Quest in the Midst of COVID-19

“…Being here and not there: The Reshaping of Ethnographic Realities Roth et al (2021) show us how amidst the pandemic, the transition of a first-year anthropology course from in-person to Zoom format has reshaped the spaces and relations in the domestic sphere of the participants. Indeed, the porosity of a seemingly fixed material reality, such as the household, illustrates how the participants accommodate their own domestic spaces into a new order of things.…”