The quarantine archives: educators in “social isolation”

Abstract

PurposeThe archives gathered in this collection engage in the current COVID-19 moment. They do so in order to attempt to understand it, to think and feel with others and to create a collectivity that, beyond the slogan “we are in this together”, seriously contemplates the implications of what it means to be given an opportunity to alter the course of history, to begin to learn to live and educate otherwise.Design/methodology/approachThis paper is collectively written by twelve academics in March 2020, a few weeks into the first closing down of common spaces in 2020, Victoria, Australia. Writing through and against “social isolation”, the twelve quarantine archives in this paper are all at once questions, methods, data, analysis, implications and limitations of these pandemic times and their afterlives.FindingsThese quarantine archives reveal a profound sense of dislocation, relatability and concern. Several of the findings in this piece succeed at failing to explain in generalising terms these un-new upending times and, in the process, raise more questions and propose un-named methodologies.Originality/valueIf there is anything this paper could claim as original, it would be its present ability to respond to the current times as a historical moment of intensity. At times when “isolation”, “self” and “contained” are the common terms of reference, the “collective”, “connected” and “socially engaged” nature of this paper defies those very terms. Finally, the socially transformative desire archived in each of the pieces is a form of future history-making that resists the straight order with which history is often written and made.