Paper short abstract:

Reflecting on the impact of lockdown conditions on communication in education and ethnographic research settings, the paper discusses opportunities and limitations of different media and communication technologies to create communities of practice, imagination and affective sociality.

Paper long abstract:

Reflecting on the impact of fluctuating lockdown conditions on communication in education and ethnographic research settings, the paper discusses the opportunities and limitations presented by different media and communication technologies to interact across distance. Drawing on a notion of creativity that highlights the dialectics of un/expectedness (Svašek and Meyer 2016), it explores different ways in which researchers and educators have improvised and used painting, illustration, storytelling and film to tackle the crisis. The paper is partly autobiographic, analysing my own struggles to find ways to overcome distance and silence and create communities of practice, imagination and affective sociality.

2016 Creativity in Transition. Politics and Aesthetics of Cultural Production across

the Globe. Oxford: Berghahn (eds. M. Svašek and B. Meyer)