Biographical Perspectives on Lives Lived During Covid-19

This volume elucidates international biographical and narrative perspectives on how COVID-19 influenced people’s daily lives across different countries and contexts. It draws together global interdisciplinary scholarly contributions and conceptualizes the lived life as a complex, multilayered and multidimensional phenomenon that is constantly unfolding both in and across time. Significantly, this volume focuses on seldom-heard groups including persons diagnosed with HIV, COVID-19 dissenters, prisoners, essential workers, waste pickers, refugees and migrants. The chapters focus on the pandemic's multifarious impacts on people’s lived realities in personal and professional domains, exploring the complexity of people’s relationships with family, friends, interactions with colleagues and students and the centrality of emotions, to everyday human experiences, including grief, loss and loneliness as well as moments of joy and processes of personal renewal. This volume explores innovative questions, issues and challenges on the development and utilization of rich, biographical narrative methodologies during COVID-19, addressing important issues like power and voice, and pragmatic questions of how to do biographic research whilst socially distant. Contributions to this work illuminate the multidimensionality of human experiences, adaptability to adverse circumstances and the complexity of working through unanticipated global events whilst reimagining novel social futures.