‘Everybody’s Always Here with Me!’

Abstract

Social distancing has been the central public health strategy for tackling the coronavirus pandemic worldwide. But the ‘Stay Home, Stay Safe’ order in the United Kingdom and the consequent closure of nurseries and schools also created an unprecedented degree of proximity within households. Based on interviews with mothers of young children in Scotland, this article provides early insight into the ways that mothers manage the forced intimacies of family life under lockdown and the opportunities they create through the innovative management of space and time. The result is a more expansive understanding of the family in contemporary Scotland and a notion of intimacy characterised as much by the necessity of distance and distinction as by proximity and mutuality.

Blurred Boundaries

“…As indicated by previous scholars who have studied the effect of technology on the lived experiences of families and drawn attention to the spatial and temporal dimensions of said impacts, this convergence of virtual work and nonwork roles attributed to the voluntary and nonvoluntary transition to schooling at home, when considered contextually, attests to the supposition that the organization of space throughout the course of the pandemic is tied to perceived notions of personal spatial sovereignty (Gubina & Kirillova, 2020;Kossek et al, 2021;Leichter et al, 1985;McNeilly & Reece, 2020;Schieman & Badawy, 2020).…”

“…The pandemic has led to an acceleration in the transformation of the existing traditional social structure with regard to work and school, which is best considered in terms of the heightened pressure to extend further the use of communications technology for teleworking and distance learning purposes within infrastructures unprepared for such large-scale digitization (Kerimova, 2020;Yeremenko et al, 2020). The result was a radical dependence on video conferencing platforms such as Zoom, and GoToMeeting, among others, which not only complicated the temporal and regulatory dimensions of learning and telework but changed the spatial organization of activities that once took place outside the home and placed them in close proximity to others in the household (Cho, 2020;Riedl, 2021;McNeilly & Reece, 2020). This movement of all activities into the home has perpetuated a shift in the way time is allocated and perceived, resulting in the creation of rituals as temporal markers in timeless days.…”

“…From the ensuing disruption of school, work and non-workrelated boundaries emerged a perceived lack of physical space experienced by families during the pandemic which reflects a pattern similar to the individual separation of meanings for space created by members of urban structures in the pre-pandemic era and associated with contemporary mandates for social distancing (Bull, 2005;Hall, 1963;Holt et al, 2021;Nia, 2021). Social distancing requirements have impacted perceptions of personal space so that they are now more closely attached to perceived rather than actual risk of infection due to a hyper-awareness of privacy and space attributed to new standards for pandemic proximity which have in turn, resulted in a conspicuous enlargement of both the boundaries of personal space in the metaphysical realm and in virtual environments (Holt et al, 2021;Mehta, 2020;McNeilly & Reece, 2020;Welsch et al, 2021). Therefore, these shifts in the spatial and temporal organization of the home point to a reconfiguration of family roles that have further blurred the boundaries between technology and the work-family context (Schieman & Badawy, 2020;Leichter, 1979).…”

Fostering intimacy on TikTok: a platform that ‘listens’ and ‘creates a safe space’

“…Transformations in relation to intimacy are underway with the COVID-19 pandemic, which has marked the entry of lockdowns and physical distancing into our lives. Lockdowns and curfews have generated ‘forced intimacies’ (McNeilly and Reece, 2020: 19) with the household while restricting the scope of coupling for those who are not living in the same household (McKenzie, 2020). The public health regulations of the pandemic have also minimized physical contact between people, heralding the lessening of a particular sensorial quality in interpersonal communication, namely, the sense of touch (Nguyen, 2020).…”

Transitional (in)Justice as Duration

“…By rendering the untimeliness, our faith in law, as one of the conceptual foundations of transitional justice, 105 will have the chance to re-emerge-to understand transition as more than what McNeilly writes as a "political blunt discourse." 106 That said, it is the way legal actors can shift the way they treat race as political to lived experience.…”