Changing Practices in a Pandemic Situation: Strategies for Coping with the Crisis

Abstract

This article focuses on the changes in the practices of everyday life during the first and the beginning of the second waves of the COVID-19 pandemic. The study is based on the personal diaries of 34 social science scholars who were invited to openly reflect on their lives during the six months of the pandemic (from March 25 to September 30, 2020). The article relies on Shatsky’s approach as a framework for theoretical analysis. It presumes the consideration of practices in the form of a hierarchically organized constellation, which is subject to certain organizational principles. One principle is ‘telos’, i.e., goal-setting, within which practices acquire significance when aimed at achieving a certain result. The other principle is ‘ethos’, i.e., a general framework of understanding which gives the practices meaning and moral significance. The article attempts to identify the mechanisms for reconfiguring practices under the influence of the pandemic and the meanings that the authors of the ‘pandemic diaries’ gave to their maintenance, change and reconstruction, after the immediate danger seemed to have receded or weakened. The article concludes that the preservation of habitus—a habitual way of life associated with shared values — becomes a supportive framework which protects against stress and uncertainty, and creates a challenge, because it makes it necessary to reproduce many practices that are not vital in a crisis. The author concludes that the most important constellations of practices, and their key components, were preserved by the research participants.