‘Looking Back, Looking Forward’: Emotions, Sensual Experiences and Temporality as Future Developments in Biographic Narrative Research

This main point of this penultimate contribution is twofold. Firstly, this chapter summarises the principal arguments made in preceding chapters and sections of this book and secondly, it offers new horizons for future research agendas in biographic and narrative research. The chapter delineates two of the central tropes in this book in (i) emphasising the significance of research on the complexity of everyday life during COVID-19 lockdowns, which is a hallmark of section one and subsequent sections on education and work, and (ii) methodological innovations in biographic and narrative research which occurred during COVID-19 and which are elucidated throughout preceding chapters. Subsequently, the chapter proposes new research loci and agendas using immersive and creative methods including autoethnography to explore how so-called ‘ordinary’ narratives about post-COVID realities are both generated and learned in society. Significantly, the chapter engages with relevant contemporary debates with regards to evidence-based policy-making, vulnerabilities, transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary research and the significance of (intersecting) haptic, temporal and emotional aspects of the COVID-19 crisis which this book draws attention to.