Imagining the city in lockdown: Place in the COVID-19 self-recordings of the Lothian Diary Project

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic brought about a profound change to the organization of space and time in our daily lives. In this paper we analyze the self-recorded audio/video diaries made by residents of Edinburgh and the Lothian counties during the first national lockdown. We identify three ways in which diarists describe a shift in place-time, or “chronotope”, in lockdown. We argue that the act of making a diary for an audience of the future prompts diarists to contrast different chronotopes, and each of these orientations illuminates the differential impact of the COVID-19 lockdowns across the community.

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© 2022 Cowie, Hall-Lew, Elliott, Klingler, Markl and McNulty. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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DOI

https://doi.org/10.3389/frai.2022.945643

Repository URI

https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/publications/837702f5-38a9-4dc3-b03e-7e511bc7d6b7