Crisis, control and community: Documenting life during Covid-19

How do we capture lived experiences of a pandemic that profoundly disrupts daily life? "Living with COVID in Southeast Asia: Personal and Visual Experiences of Crisis, Control and Community” is a new ARI project uncovering the experiences of life amid the Covid-19 pandemic in Southeast Asia. 

Our research team is led by Dr. Gerard McCarthy, Professor Naoko Shimazu and Dr. Yang Yang, from ARI’s Inter-Asian Engagement cluster, with the support of Tinesh Indrarajah, Regina Hong, Ling Xi Min and Clair Hurford. Together we have begun exploring ways to document the upheaval of everyday life experienced by millions of people across ASEAN. The project commenced during Singapore’s circuit breaker (which ran from 3 April to 1 June 2020) after we began to see lockdown measures across ASEAN relax and realized the need to properly document this extraordinary moment in time.

Written accounts, including social media posts, offer one kind of insight into people’s experience during pandemic. Yet a little acknowledged element of how Covid-19 has been experienced is the visual imprint on our lives: posters, social distancing markers, mask vending machines and so on all modify everyday landscapes and bring about a new understanding of space.

The project also explores how people narrate their experiences of the pandemic, which include visual and spatial changes. Words, tone and the parallels people make in talking about this period will shape the way we make sense of the lock-down and upheaval of 2020 well into the future.

With those considerations in mind, the team commenced a qualitative project consisting of two parts — an oral history component and a crowdsourced visual repository and analysis component. Three themes — crisis, control, and community — were chosen to provide an analytical framework for understanding images and oral histories including how people experience lock-downs, the way they survived and the impacts on cohesion. There are six main objectives for the project:

1. Developing and curating a visual repository
2. Benchmarking and exploring alignment with global oral history and visual repository projects
3. Crafting an ethical framework for the project
4. Delivering an online training module for oral history interviewers across the region
5. Collecting a pilot sample of oral histories from every country of ASEAN to allow for broader geographic comparisons of living with Covid-19 across the region
6. Written summaries on broad themes identified in images and oral histories

To achieve these objectives, the team met regularly (via Zoom, of course!) to develop project plans and manuals to guide research. Oral history questionnaires, metadata templates and data entry guidelines were iteratively discussed and modified by drawing from the best practices of ongoing oral history and visual projects.

Particular attention was paid to the ethics of collecting data during a pandemic. For instance, what should we do if an oral history contained references to violating circuit breaker measures? Or if an image or video recording captured someone not social distancing or other illicit actions?

Other questions that we considered were copyright and distribution issues for the images that we collected. The iterative, collaborative approach has been useful not only for ensuring that members of the team are on the same page but also accommodating work across different time zones.

Informed by a digital humanities approach, the team chose platforms that best fit the project’s scope and intended users (the general public and scholars). Instagram was chosen as a platform for image distribution given that the general public is largely familiar with it. Tagging our images using existing tags or creating new ones of our own also allow for uploaded images to be part of a larger network.