Massive and Microscopic: Autoethnographic Affects in the Time of COVID

Abstract

This essay uses several of the prompts from the Massive::Microscopic experiment as a jumping off point for considering how affect theory and critical autoethnography offer us a framework for understanding, creating, and acting together in the time of COVID. Through stories of cloud-watching, mindfulness meditation, and other encounters with atmospheres and movements, we connect individual experiences of the pandemic to Buddhist understandings of a universal “we.” As a research practice committed to joining microscopic with macro lived experience, critical autoethnography offers a speculative method for collective reckoning with our infinitesimal selves in relation to the infinite of a pandemic.