Human Resource Management and Organisational Behaviour Seminar Series. "Affect, action and incommensurability: Surfacing law and time in Mass Observation diarists' accounts of the Covid-19 pandemic"
Published: 27 May 2024
18 June 2024. Professor Emily Grabham, University of Kent
18 June 2024. Professor Emily Grabham, University of Kent
"Affect, action and incommensurability: Surfacing law and time in Mass Observation diarists' accounts of the Covid-19 pandemic"
Tuesday, 18 June 2024. 15:00-16:30
Room 487, Adam Smith Business School & PGT Hub
Abstract
In 2020, the collaborative A Day At A Time Project (Kent, Bristol, Edinburgh, Stirling and York) commissioned a directive from the Mass Observation Project, an archive of everyday life in Britain, based at the University of Sussex. Founded in 1939 as an ‘anthropology of ourselves’, the Mass Observation Project set up a panel of voluntary diary writers in the 1980s. We asked the Mass Observation diarists to write about their shifting experiences of the present and future, and their new rhythms, in this shocking new period, epoch, or crisis that we later came to understand as a pandemic. With a socio-legal focus, Sian Beynon-Jones (York) and I were particularly concerned with law in everyday life: how people were making new times in relation to changing laws and regulations. We hoped that through this research, we might get somewhere close to a legal consciousness of pandemic time. In this paper, I discuss the rich and strange data we received through the directive. I reflect on the challenges and promise that incommensurable written accounts of everyday life bring with them for socio-legal analysis of time and temporalities.
Bio
Emily Grabham is a socio-legal scholar based at the University of Kent. Her research focuses on the relationship between law and time. Her work in this area includes the monograph Brewing Legal Times: Things, Form and the Enactment of Law (2016, University of Toronto Press) and the edited collection Law and Time (2019, Routledge, co-edited with Sian Beynon-Jones). With colleagues across sociology, cultural studies, environmental humanities, and organisation studies, she is a collaborator on the A Day at a Time project, which analyses the everyday experience of time in the Covid-19 pandemic. Her most recent article is 'The rules are all over the place: Mass Observation, time, and law in the Covid-19 pandemic', Journal of Law & Society (2023) with Sian Beynon-Jones and Nadine Hendrie.
For further information, please contact business-school-research@glasgow.ac.uk
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First published: 27 May 2024