Introduction: Art, Autoethnography and Public Pedagogies in Lockdown

This book sits in the transdisciplinary space between digital ethnography, autoethnography, arts-based research and creative pedagogies. It contributes to the growing body of literature responding to the COVID-19 pandemic (Mathiyazhagan in Overcome COVID-19: Creative expressions of young people 2020), and centres around a 21-day digital autoethnographic collaborative online experiment in which over 165 participants from 26 countries responded to daily prompts in a range of affective and creative modalities, to express our experiences of isolation, community, sense-making, and life as it changed under the first few weeks of COVID. Teachers, artists, academics, philosophers and makers all drew from our own practices and geo-political perspectives to collectively find commonality in exploring the macro conditions through to the microscopic and granular experiences of our culturally diverse lives.