Grief in Times of Corona (Envoi).

Cathy Fowley

doi:10.1177/1077800420960140

Abstract

This autoethnographic poem tells of personal grief happening in a time of lockdown. It draws on the concept of chronotope, a discrete time and space unit, a parenthesis of sorts, which I have chosen to illustrate as a bubble. In our daily speech, we see bubbles as related to both time and space, now with the added meaning of close relationship of people, those who belong to the same COVID bubble. In this autoethnographic piece, relationships are mediated by technology which anchors our bubbles together, with multimodal links carrying affect and emotion.

Highlights

This autoethnographic piece was written in secluded place in the West of Ireland, in what everyone called unprecedented times, and at a time when space became both fragmented and legally bound throughout the world
I am haunted by chronotopes,1 I see them everywhere
Bakhtin writes about the literary artistic chronotope, where “spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole

Summary

Introduction

This autoethnographic piece was written in secluded place in the West of Ireland, in what everyone called unprecedented times, and at a time when space became both fragmented and legally bound throughout the world. Bubbles within bubbles, constraining place, constraining time. I take photographs on my phone, of roads, bridges, lake, my 2 km bubble.

Results

Conclusion