Co-creating a cabinet of curiosities: Collaborative journaling, techno-tempo-carto-bodiments and pandemic post-phenomenological lifeworlds

The Covid-19 pandemic has had widespread impacts globally. In Higher Education there was a shift to online teaching and learning where institutions blended live lectures and seminars, recorded lectures and online reading groups. This has come with a number of challenges and possibilities and, as academics, we wrestled with this new technology, but recognised its benefits. This also became apparent in our conferencing lives where seminars and conferences we would not have been able to attend became more accessible. Since March 2020 we have worked together through wires and cables, reliant on our internet and Wi-Fi connections. Our multimedia presentation is an opportunity for us to explore and trace our shared experiences. We have entitled this our techno-tempo-carto-bodiment which we theorise as a relational Jo-Nikki hybrid knot of our embodied cartographic entanglements with life, bodies, technology and time.

Our presentation explores our shared entanglements with posthuman and feminist materialist theory and methodology. Thinking with post-phenomenological lifeworlds, we explore ideas of embodiment, affect, intra-activity and the entanglement between our experiences. Post-phenomenology is concerned with the ways in which the impact of the world registers on bodies in the form of relationalities and affectivities, and how these shape our experiences (Trafí-Prats, 2020). We draw on methodologies of research-creation which provides experimental alternatives to explore how ‘knowledge’ might be produced and what data might look like (Fairchild et al., 2022). Together we have mapped the ebb and flow of our pandemic lifeworlds which become punctuated with flickering glimpses of ‘normality’. Our lifeworld cabinet of curiosities (MacLure, 2013) is presented in an online journaling space with objects, images, videos, sounds, our research and theoretical fragments. In this journaling time has been untethered from perceptions of ontic and linear clock time and as we post and become enmeshed multisensory data-ing. The contents of the online journal are affective where past, present and future events are entangled and relational in spacetimemattering (Barad, 2007). These affects leave impressions on our bodies and bring the immediacy of pandemic lifeworlds together with life before the pandemic and longer-term consequences of ecological Anthropocentric concerns that blur professional and personal timespaces. Our techno-tempo-carto-bodiment is a becoming of human, non-human and other-than-human bodies with two academics posting, talking and thinking together virtually in different cities in England through and in extraordinary global events. Our online journaling is a cabinet of curiosities, a Wunderkammern, where a range of objects form an assemblage of fragments (MacLure, 2013; Taylor et al., 2019) that document our (pandemic) experiences (Albin-Clark, 2020). These haphazard curiosities range from sounds of footsteps, lego min-figures, masks, dead birds, echoing lecture theatres and motorway matrix signs. As we think about what new relationships have become enmeshed in the techno-tempo-carto-bodiment we invite you to be part of this and share your images, sounds, objects and video to generate new additions to our cabinet of curiosities https://edgehill.padlet.org/joalbinclark1/pxley29habm0p97x. We hope that making these relational connections afford us alternative ways of living, affecting and sharing lifeworlds together-apart.