A Crisis in Time: Timespaces during the COVID-19 quarantine.

Student thesis: Master Thesis and HD Thesis

  • Devin Christensen Hedegaard
4. term, Learning and Innovative Change, Master (Master Programme)
This project explored how chosen Danes experienced their everyday life during the COVID-19 crisis, and analyzed what we can learn about time and sustainable time-environments through examining how the interviewees experienced and navigated the quarantine. It is a qualitative case study, based upon four virtual interviews, conducted through MS Teams during an eight day period. The empirical material was obtained during one of the most intense and tight parts of the quarantine in Denmark. During the interviews the participants were briefly included in the analytical process, by collaborating with the researcher on placing their experiences on a graph. The project based it’s theoretical framework upon theories about time, rhythm and time environments from Danish work life scientists. The aforementioned graph is an attempt to contribute to a furthering of these scientists’ concept of sustainable rhythms. This was combined with the Sense of Coherence concept from the Israeli-American medical sociologist Aaron Antonovsky. The chosen theories state that time is organized into institutional Time Orders, which dictate a logic of how things are done timewise, from which the author argues that this crisis provides an opportunity to study the participants' navigation of time when this institutional logic is compromised. This study attempts to move beyond only seeing time as linear, measured time, and does so by including the personal experience of time, as time is seen connected to context, space and structures. It is argued that the participants experience a unique kind of crisis time, which is named Corona-time. Furthermore it is argued that the participants with a stronger Sense of Coherence find better ways to navigate this Corona Time, through deriving meaning from other roles and areas of their lives, such as care-takers for their families. Due to time being seen as lived experience connected to space and action, it is argued that the crisis affects the participants' experience of time itself, leading in some instances to a state of timelessness. In this state of timelessness not only does work and free time collide and melt together, but the participants lose grasp and feeling of time generally as time loses connection to contexts and the participants are unable to inhibit the usual spaces connected to certain senses of time. Finally the project ends in a discussion of some of the ramifications of combining time and medical sociology, which entails very different epistemological approaches. It is questioned how to grasp time as a theoretical term, as time and rhythm can be seen as indicative of what philosophy of science lies behind a study. This project has attempted to both explore time as an experience and subjective term, but through the use of Sense of Coherence there has been an attempt at making it more quantifiable. This study argues that there is a importance in trying both, and that this combination, while clashing in some ways, did yield a unique insight in how time can be seen, experienced and understood during a unique historical moment.
LanguageDanish
Publication date12 Jun 2020

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