Paper short abstract:

This paper traces moments of joy during the Covid-19 pandemic ethnographically, based on in-person fieldwork in Scotland. It analyses joy as a feeling of being propelled that is entangled with closeness and care in our relations to others.

Paper long abstract:

Rather than understanding the pandemic as a crisis that only brought about enduring experiences of loneliness and isolation, this paper engages with the ‘microdynamics’ (Biehl and Locke 2017) of life under lockdown. Based on in-person fieldwork on the Isle of Coll (Scotland) in 2020 and 2021, it traces moments of joy from a community gardening day, over stumbles and falls during an Easter walk on the hills, to an afternoon spent waiting for the bin lorry in the island hotel. The first two of these occasions were organised by people who sought to create possibilities for joy and connection in a context of increasing isolation, while the last occurred unexpectedly. In all of them joy emerged from play, often led by the children present, and was entangled with care for each other and for the environment. Through these pieces of ethnography, I analyse joy as an affect – the feeling of being propelled – that mediates closeness and care in our relations to other humans and more-than-humans. While the pandemic increased loneliness and isolation, I argue that, in this cultural context, it also turned once ordinary experiences of closeness into extraordinary ones and in the process amplified joy. The paper reflects on how paying attention to this could help us understand the enduring changes in the dynamics of loneliness and connection and perhaps even contribute to imagining ways of creating joy in a post-pandemic world.