Paper short abstract:

We examine how pandemic measures affect explicit and implicit homely orders, e.g. whether and how people re-arrange their homes. In addition to online interviews and video tours, participants are asked to document their everyday-lives through different media during the second lockdown in Vienna.

Paper long abstract:

The covid-19 pandemic has drawn our attention to our homes. The high rise of real estate prices since the first lockdown in spring 2020, and the increased profits of furniture stores support this claim. In general lockdowns, quarantines and other measures have led to an increase in time spent at home. As a consequence, people had to arrange and transform their homes e.g. into offices, schools, fitness studios while renegotiating living constallations i.e. living alone or in cohabitation.

The pandemic situation has, moreover, affected different households in very different ways, which not only makes inequality visible, but also exacerbates it. While groups of lower income are tendentially restricted to fewer square meters which may cause functional overlappings of spaces, wealthier groups with more living space available may adapt the requirements for different functions more easily. Against this backdrop, we examine how people dwell and arrange their homes during the restrictions to deal with these requirements. While doing so we pursue the question of how pandemic measures affect explicit and implicit homely orders i.e. spatialities, both in single apartments as well as in shared living spaces, and how arrangements about e.g. privacy and noise challenge home-structures and perceptions of cohabitation.

The ethnographic data will be collected during the second lockdown in Vienna in November 2020. In addition to online interviews and online-video tours (go-along video interviews), participants are asked to document their everyday-lives through different media.