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- Title
Convivial Quarantines: Cultivating Co-presence at a Distance.
- Authors
Bascuñan-Wiley, Nicholas; DeSoucey, Michaela; Fine, Gary Alan
- Abstract
Sociology's focus on sociality and co-presence has long oriented studies of commensality—the social dimension of eating together. This literature commonly prioritizes face-to-face interactions and takes physical proximity for granted. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 largely halted in-person gatherings and altered everyday foodways. Consequently, many people turned to digital commensality, cooking and eating together through video-call technology such as Zoom and FaceTime. We explore the implications of these new foodways and ask: has digital commensality helped cultivate co-presence amidst pandemic-induced physical separation? If so, how? To address these questions, we analyze two forms of qualitative data collected by the first author: interviews with individuals who cooked and ate together at a distance since March 2020 and digital ethnography during different groups' online food events (e.g., happy hours, dinners, holiday gatherings, and birthday celebrations). Digital commensality helps foster a sense of co-presence and social connectedness at a distance. Specifically, participants use three temporally oriented strategies to create or maintain co-presence: they draw on pre-pandemic pasts and reinvent culinary traditions to meet new circumstances; they creatively adapt novel digital foodways through online dining; and they actively imagine post-pandemic futures where physically proximate commensality is again possible.
- Subjects
SOCIAL belonging; SOCIAL distance; SOCIAL distancing; HAPPY hours; COMPULSIVE eating
- Publication
Qualitative Sociology, 2022, Vol 45, Issue 3, p371
- ISSN
0162-0436
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1007/s11133-022-09512-8