In mid-March, I took one of the last flights out of Lebanon before the government closed the international airport. At the time of writing this critical commentary, both the UK (where I normally live) and Lebanon (where I do my work) are on 'lockdown' as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak.
My fieldwork interrupted, I came back to London to sit in front of my laptop and regroup. At some point, I found a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of my proposed thesis. One of the chapters was called 'Methodologies for moving with changing circumstances'. What foresight! But the description was skeletal: I didn't have much of a plan for navigating a global shutdown and health crisis.
Around the time that the lockdown was announced in the UK (two days after I got back), anthropologists began frantically sharing resources about digital ethnographies. Although I haven't yet been convinced that this is the way to deal with COVID-19 in my own work, it did remind me of some thoughts I'd already been having after some conversations with young people in Bar Elias, my research area.
During the empirical work I'd conducted with a team in Spring 2019 in Bar Elias, many of the young people we spoke with said that they spent a lot (if not most) of their time on their phones. I began to think about the digital space - by which I am referring to WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram but also the popular multi-player game PUBG - as offering possibilities for different kinds of places. These places are places of encounter, and simultaneously - for these young people at least - places which offer escape. These places facilitated encounters between people who would otherwise not be able to meet: between young people and distant relatives, friends, lovers. They facilitated experimental encounters, free from watchful eyes of fathers, brothers and neighbours. They also allowed young people to experiment with their own subjectivities - how they related to themselves and others - by carefully curating how they appeared.
During the lockdown in Lebanon and the UK, I've been chatting over WhatsApp with some of the young people who I've met over the years. In particular, I chat with some sisters who live in an informal tented settlement. This settlement is built on private land, owned by a farming familiy who found it uneconomical to irrigate their fields with clean water - not that of the Litani. The field was transformed by the shift of the Litani River into a state of non-life, of creeping barrenness, thanks to the dangerous amounts of chemicals pumped into it upstead.
In our shared digital space, I imagine the lives of these girls lived out in the confines of that field, redefined as a settlement by the non-life of the river. We send each other our drawings. We have collectively discovered a common language of care through these drawn and shared images. Though they tell the viewer nothing of the Litani River, nor the field, nor what life is like in lockdown, they do allow the care that has emerged from encounters in these toxic places, to endure.
Although I am yet to discover this, these places might also facilitate the emergence of new youth subjectivities. The possibilities that these places offer could shift many young people into a new way of being in relation to others.
In mid-March, I took one of the last flights out of Lebanon before the government closed the international airport. At the time of writing this critical commentary, both the UK (where I normally live) and Lebanon (where I do my work) are on 'lockdown' as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak.
My fieldwork interrupted, I came back to London to sit in front of my laptop and regroup. At some point, I found a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of my proposed thesis. One of the chapters was called 'Methodologies for moving with changing circumstances'. What foresight! But the description was skeletal: I didn't have much of a plan for navigating a global shutdown and health crisis.
Around the time that the lockdown was announced in the UK (two days after I got back), anthropologists began frantically sharing resources about digital ethnographies. Although I haven't yet been convinced that this is the way to deal with COVID-19 in my own work, it did remind me of some thoughts I'd already been having after some conversations with young people in Bar Elias, my research area.
During the empirical work I'd conducted with a team in Spring 2019 in Bar Elias, many of the young people we spoke with said that they spent a lot (if not most) of their time on their phones. I began to think about the digital space - by which I am referring to WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram but also the popular multi-player game PUBG - as offering possibilities for different kinds of places. These places are places of encounter, and simultaneously - for these young people at least - places which offer escape. These places facilitated encounters between people who would otherwise not be able to meet: between young people and distant relatives, friends, lovers. They facilitated experimental encounters, free from watchful eyes of fathers, brothers and neighbours. They also allowed young people to experiment with their own subjectivities - how they related to themselves and others - by carefully curating how they appeared.
During the lockdown in Lebanon and the UK, I've been chatting over WhatsApp with some of the young people who I've met over the years. In particular, I chat with some sisters who live in an informal tented settlement. This settlement is built on private land, owned by a farming familiy who found it uneconomical to irrigate their fields with clean water - not that of the Litani. The field was transformed by the shift of the Litani River into a state of non-life, of creeping barrenness, thanks to the dangerous amounts of chemicals pumped into it upstead.
In our shared digital space, I imagine the lives of these girls lived out in the confines of that field, redefined as a settlement by the non-life of the river. We send each other our drawings. We have collectively discovered a common language of care through these drawn and shared images. Though they tell the viewer nothing of the Litani River, nor the field, nor what life is like in lockdown, they do allow the care that has emerged from encounters in these toxic places, to endure.
Although I am yet to discover this, these places might also facilitate the emergence of new youth subjectivities. The possibilities that these places offer could shift many young people into a new way of being in relation to others.