Lockdown Diaries: Merging fact and fiction in auto/biographical research

Abstract

From January to March 2021, the UK experienced its third Covid-19 lockdown. By this time, ten months after the first UK lockdown started, the scenario of staying at home, working from home, and home schooling had become familiar. Towards the end of, so far, the final complete lockdown in England, and on the day of the budget announcements, people from across the UK were asked to complete one-day diaries for this project. The diaries, along with media accounts and other publicly accessible data, have been used to create a series of short, fictionalised narratives of one day during the pandemic. Based on the autobiographical accounts the participants produced, the stories explore how people from different backgrounds, life stages and geographical areas spent their time during the lockdown, highlighting both shared and very different experiences across and between places and age groups. The stories draw attention to mundane everyday lives during this time. The relatively experimental method of creating composite characters taken from real life also provides material for exploring how the use of fiction (here, biographical fiction) in research can help bring social science research into the public realm.