Finding law and time in UK Mass Observation diarists’ accounts of the Covid-19 pandemic
Working with colleagues in 2020 on the A Day at a Time project, we commissioned a directive from the United Kingdom’s Mass Observation Project for volunteer writers to record their changing experience of time during the Covid-19 pandemic. Our specific task was to try to understand how people were living and creating legal temporalities during this moment of upheaval. The responses were rich, detailed, valuable, yet often seemingly incommensurable, based, as they were, in everyday experience. We struggled with surfacing and understanding articulations of law and of time and their relationship with one another. In this article, we describe how we found a way through this conundrum by paying attention to affect and action.