Ever since the COVID-19 outbreak unfolded into a major health and social crisis in Spain Adolfo Estalella and I have been taking part in a peculiar Telegram-based messaging group. ‘Cor on Collaboration’, as the space was named, turned into our main source of news, links, experiences, appreciations, reflections and collective debates. It was originally set up by some of our ethnographic acquaintances in the last years, a loose group of architects, designers and cultural workers with the goal of developing a version of a podcast radio show based in Madrid, devoted to exploring manifold forms of urban collaboration. From 20 people by mid-March to the actual 84, the group soon became a frantic and lively space where all participants have been sharing personal experiences, commenting media articles, discussing specialized papers and pre-prints or analysing collectively anything relevant to understand the unfolding of the COVID crisis. From its onset the convening team encouraged us to send audio messages to compile and edit them, together with other material, as podcasts that could reach out to a wider public beyond the group. Here we reflect on the methodological inspiration we could draw from this peculiar use of a regular off-the-shelf collaborative digital platform for our work as social scientists. Shocked and perplexed by the present situation, we (as the rest of our companions) have found in ‘Cor on collaboration’ a resource to navigate uncertain times: Not just a place for solidarity, debate and contact, but a place driven by the shared effort to problematize the present situation. Contributing to the rising debate on how to undertake ethnographic work in times of lockdown we would like to intimate the affordances of this particular ‘telegrammatic’ correspondence that has allowed us (and our counterparts in this conversation) to inquire into the uncertainty of these strange times.
We have written a small piece, published as part of the Sociological Review’s Solidarity and Care series reflecting on the experience:
[EN] The Method of Telegrammatic Correspondence: A Digital Mode of Inquiry during ‘Lockdown’
**
[Update 26.10.2020] Now reblogged in the UniSiegen’s Interface blog: “The method of telegrammatic correspondence“