Purpose

The 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/approach

This 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.

Findings

These
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/value

If 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.