Now as a Liminal Space, Writing as a Patchwork: Autoethnographic Reflections on the Self in the Middle of the Pandemic

Abstract

In the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, I came to think about the role of my identity in my scholarship. Drawing on liminality as a conceptual apparatus, this autoethnography displays multiple layers of the self, that is, thresholding, passing, and daydreaming. Moving everyday encounters into parts of discourses, I consider how the self is always in full of uncertainty, wandering, rather than being fixed. I end with reflecting on the writing process: autoethnographic writing has been continual process to capture multiple liminal moments into a patchwork; it becomes possible by distancing the observing-self from the observed-self, however temporal those are.