Assemblage Thinking in Lockdown: An Autoethnographic Approach

Khan, Salman

Abstract

Over the past year, COVID-19 and the restrictions imposed in its wake have meant that a range of research methodologies involving social contact could no longer be pursued. Whilst this time has been challenging, this article aims to showcase how it nonetheless presents opportunities for methodological innovation that can be carried forward into the future. Drawing upon an autoethnographic dissertation that sought to conceptualize the researcher’s lived experience in Scotland’s lockdown as an assemblage that was situated within, and intersected with, the wider “lockdown cultural assemblage,” it proceeds chronologically from how the research began to inductively drawn findings on shifts to lived experience produced by the lockdown across five interrelated dimensions to lived experience: embodiment, spatiality, temporality, a changing vocabulary of sociality, and narratological environment and broader context. In recounting this journey, it demonstrates how assemblage theory can both benefit from, as well as transform, autoethnography as its primary methodological strategy.

Citation

Khan, S. (2022). Assemblage Thinking in Lockdown: An Autoethnographic Approach. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 51(6), 751-783. https://doi.org/10.1177/08912416211067563

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Nov 29, 2022
• Online Publication Date: Jan 17, 2022
• Publication Date: 2022-12
• Deposit Date: Jan 19, 2022
• Publicly Available Date: Jan 19, 2022
• Journal: Journal of Contemporary Ethnography
• Print ISSN: 0891-2416
• Electronic ISSN: 1552-5414
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 51
• Issue: 6
• Pages: 751-783
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/08912416211067563
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1219635