Excavating the Complexity of Everyday Lives Across Contexts During COVID-19: Biography Making, Methodological Innovations and Post Pandemic (Re)-Imaginaries

This chapter contextualises global scholarly contributions from biographic, narrative researchers, illuminating the richness of life pathways, decision-making and individual and collective responses to COVID-19 restrictions, namely social distancing, mask wearing and mass vaccination programmes. Significantly, this volume elucidates rich narrative data from social scientific researchers in six continents, revealing the diversity of citizen’s reactions to the global COVID-19 pandemic and governmental policy responses, with regards to everyday routines, including transformations to work, education and online learning, gendered division of labour among academic mothers, time usage, and methodological innovations and developments including ‘smellwalks’, creative approaches like life writing, Photo Voice, ethnography and online interviewing. Importantly, in this book, we also map the state of the art extant biographic, narrative research on lives lived during COVID-19, further revealing the importance of storytelling, memory, emotions and the significance of biographic, narrative methods for the planning and implementation of policies in advance of possible future pandemics and global catastrophes. The book engages with the meanings of societal transformations and salient methodological questions which are nuanced, multi-layered and highly complex in chapters in the three principal sections of the book which are delineated as follows (1) Transformations to everyday life: routines, practices and new life trajectories (2) the impacts of COVID-19 in educational and work spheres and (3) Methodological practices and innovations during a global pandemic. Significantly, in the remainder of this chapter, we illuminate ways that this book both contributes to and extends existing biographic and narrative research; how it adds to new transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary research agendas on COVID-19 and post COVID-19 imaginaries with biographic narrative methods at their core.