Everyday Life in the Covid-19 Pandemic Mass Observation's 12th May Diaries
Produktdetaljer
Om bidragsyterne
Nick Clarke is Associate Professor of Human Geography at University of Southampton, UK. His books include The Good Politician (2018) and Globalising Responsibility (2010).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 skillfully contextualizing 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, UK
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, UK
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 London, UK
[A] magnificent piece of work.
- Richard Horton, The Lancet
Nick Clarke’s <i>Everyday Life in the </i><i>COVID-19 Pandemic</i> is critical, comprehensive, and compelling ... The collection aims to present an account that is both human and democratic, and it achieves this, bringing accessibility and securing legacy. It is a testimony to long-established and well-proven significance of the [Mass Observation] in historical record keeping and narrative weaving.
Family & Community History
How will the Covid-19 pandemic be remembered? What did it mean to people? How did it feel? This book provides a compelling account of the pandemic as it was experienced in the UK.
Everyday Life in the Covid-19 Pandemic is a democratic history based on the 5,000 diaries collected by Mass Observation on 12 May 2020. It is a record of what many of these diarists wrote, from a wide range of positions, in a variety of voices and on a wealth of different subjects. The book shines a light on their lives on the day in question, their experiences during the first two months of the pandemic, and their hopes and fears for the coming months and years. The diaries capture much of everyday life in the pandemic for millions of people in the UK and beyond: the activities, events, and rituals (from funerals to working from home); the sites and stages (from shops to Zoom); the roles and categories (from ‘key workers’ to ‘vulnerable groups’); the frames (from luck to ‘the new normal’); and the moods (from anxiety to grief).
In these diaries, we see what people did when the pandemic arrived in the UK, but also what people thought and felt – how they interpreted the pandemic experience and gave it meaning. We see both how the nation responded and the nation who responded. The book also includes two essays offering expert contextualisation of the diaries and discussion of their value for narrating the pandemic and presenting everyday life.
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Remembering the COVID-19 pandemic
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
Conclusion: Presenting everyday life
Notes
References
General index
Index to diarists
The Mass-Observation Critical Series pairs innovative interdisciplinary scholarship with rich archival materials from the original Mass-Observation movement and the current Mass Observation Project. Launched in 1937, the Mass-Observation movement aimed to study the everyday life of ordinary Britons. The Mass Observation Project continues to document and archive the everyday lives, thoughts and attitudes of ordinary Britons to this day. Mass-Observation, as a whole, is an innovative research organization, a social movement, and an archival project that spans much of the 20th and early 21st centuries.
The series makes Mass-Observation’s rich primary sources accessible to a wide range of academics and students across multiple disciplines, as well as to the general reading public. Books in the series include re-issues of important original Mass-Observation publications, edited and introduced by leading scholars in the field, and thematically-oriented anthologies of Mass-Observation material. The series also facilitates cutting-edge research by established and new scholars using Mass-Observation resources to present fresh perspectives on everyday life, popular culture and politics, visual culture, emotions, and other relevant topics.
Series Editors
Lucy D. Curzon is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Alabama, USA. She is the author of Visual Culture and Mass Observation: Depicting Everyday Lives (2017), which was awarded the Historians of British Art Book Prize for a single-authored book with a subject after 1800. With Ben Jones, she co-edited The Historical Contexts and Contemporary Uses of Mass Observation: 1930s to the Present (2025). She has previously published work on contemporary queer portrait painting and photography, British women war artists, the Ashington Group and Humphrey Spender.
Benjamin Jones teaches Modern British History at the University of East Anglia, UK. His research focuses on classed experiences and identities from the mid-twentieth century to the present with a particular emphasis on life histories, social research and social memory. He is the author of The Working Class in Mid-Twentieth Century England: Community, Identity and Social Memory (2012) and his latest research on football casuals, fanzines and the emotional politics of rave and acid house was published in Modern British History and Contemporary British History in 2023 and 2024. He is currently drawing on Mass Observation material for a book manuscript entitled “Middle England” and its “Enemies Within”: Class, Race and Feeling in Thatcher’s Britain.
Jennifer J. Purcell is Professor of History at Saint Michael’s College in Vermont, USA. Using Mass-Observation diaries and directives, her first book, Domestic Soldiers (2010), seeks to understand the day-to-day lives of six women on the home front during the Second World War. She is also the author of Mother of the BBC: Mabel Constanduros and the Development of Light Entertainment on the BBC, 1925–1957 (Bloomsbury, 2020) and editor of Mass Observation: Text, Context and Analysis of the Pioneering Pamphlet and Movement (Bloomsbury, 2023) and Reflections on British Royalty: Mass Observation and the Monarchy, 1937-2022 (with Fiona Courage; Bloomsbury, 2024).
Editorial Board
Fiona Courage, Deputy Director of Library, Culture and Heritage & Director of the Mass Observation Archive, University of Sussex, UK
Claire Langhamer, Director of the Institute of Historical Research and Professor of Modern History at the University of London, UK
Jeremy MacClancy, Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology, Oxford Brookes University, UK
Kimberley Mair, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Lethbridge, Canada
Rebecca Searle, Principal Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Brighton, UK
Matthew Taunton, Professor in the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, UK