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Paper long abstract:

From epidemiological curves and lateral flow tests stripes, to physical distancing and confinement measures, to digital networks and ecologies of support, our everyday pandemic lives relied on web of lines of communication, restriction, and support, in sometimes coordinated and sometimes unanticipated ways. The life-line, in particular, evokes the image of a rope, link, or safety net that we rely upon to escape – or withstand – dance. In this paper, I explore how pandemic life-lines shaped our experiences of COVID-19 by engendering differential trajectories of disease risk, responsibility, and vulnerability. Through an experimental multimodal approach that combines multiscalar relational analysis and multimodal (auto)ethnography, I offer a first-person account of how I came to travel, test for, fall ill, and isolate with COVID-19 in an hotel room, in late 2021, followed by post-Covid syndrome. In this account, I further suggest that immunity is best understood as a process network (as opposed to a line of defence) and that such an understanding begets an experimental approach to multimodality, in the double sense of 'experimenting' and 'experiencing.' To conclude, I discuss how this conceptual and methodological foray is ultimately about ways of making and doing ethnography with one's whole body, senses, and living milieus.