Guest Speaker: Professor Emily Grabham, University of Kent

Title: 'Lifetimes in the Everyday: Fate, Time, and Law in Mass Observation Accounts of the Early Covid-19 Pandemic'

Abstract: In the summer of 2020, working with colleagues on the 'A Day At A Time' project, I cocommissioned a directive from the Mass Observation Project (MOP). The directive asked members of MOP's panel of volunteer writers to write (or draw, or otherwise reflect on) how Covid, and Covid-related laws and regulations, were affecting their daily rhythms, routines, and their sense of time. We asked writers to look back to the early days of the pandemic and also discuss how life was changing as lockdown rules were relaxing. The directive produced over 200 responses, diverse in form, approach, and style - ranging from diaries to reports to memoir, photos, and collages - from writers across the UK. Elsewhere, I have written about 'polyrhythmic temporalities' (after Melanie Wiber) and 'tactics of anticipation' that characterised widespread public everyday experiences of time and law during the pandemic (Beynon-Jones, Grabham, and Hendrie 2023). In this paper I would like to discuss my early analysis of a different set of interconnected themes that emerged from the MOP responses: themes of fate, lifetimes, futures and law. Futures emerged as 'fissured', 'on standby' and 'reset' through Covid upheavals (Coleman and Lyon 2023). Yet when these futures came into contact with everyday legalities, something else often happened: they became weightier, freighted with a distinct affective significance in the register of the lifetime, something more like fate or - as Neferti Tadiar would put it (2012) - 'fate-playing'. This paper presents the MOP research, sketches a tentative analysis of the dimensions and meaning of legal 'fate-playing' during Covid-19, and invites reflection on my preliminary conclusions.

Beynon-Jones, Grabham, and Hendrie (2023) ' "The rules are all over the place": Mass Observation, Time, and Law in the Covid-19 Pandemic' Journal of Law & Society 50(3): 369-391. Coleman and Lyon (2023) 'Recalibrating Everyday Futures during the Covid-19 Pandemic: Futures Fissured, On Standby, and Reset in Mass Observation Responses' Sociology 57(2): 421-437. Tadiar (2012) 'Life-times in Fate-Playing' South Atlantic Quarterly 111(4): 783-80