By Alexis Black, PhD

In June 2020, I was awarded a Post-Doctoral Research Grant by the Fyssen Foundation to examine “post-pandemic” comprehensions and imaginations in Paris, France. However, as the health crisis persisted, the research became about living in the ongoing COVID19 pandemic and the project design changed significantly. As a result of these changes, I reconsidered my ideas about data and data collection and decided for the first time to use social media as a channel of communication of anthropological knowledge.

Because of frequent changes to public health restrictions, I concentrated my data collection where I was already – in Montmartre, a neighborhood in the 18th arrondissement of Paris. I spent all my fieldwork time there, including the strict lockdown from March to May 2020. This decision ensured that a return to rigid restrictions would not jeopardise my ability to circulate within and document the field site.

I conducted participant observation in Montmartre, regularly interacting and building relationships with people in the neighborhood. Nevertheless, limits to social spaces and interactions under frequently changing restrictions obligated me to alter how I recruited participants and conducted participant observation. The challenges to documenting language use in ways with which I was accustomed was an invitation for me to consider new sources and methods of data collection.

I found the limits to informal social exchange face-to-face did not equate to absence of symbolic and linguistic expression in our shared social space. Graffiti, posters, street art and stamped messages on the pavement expressed people’s experiences of confinement. I sought out this discourse in the neighborhood, photographing it, and soliciting others to share pictures of their own discoveries.

This exchange of photos, memes, quotes and news through Whatsapp and text messages with informants gave me the idea to create a digital space for this data, through which I could share what I had collected and to which others could contribute. I created an Instagram account: @montmartre.sous.covid. The account currently has 113 followers, primarily businesses and neighbours in Montmartre, and continues to function as a space in which people from the community can share their experiences.

I think that the account has had positive and interesting effects, both for me as a researcher and within the community. It is a medium in which I can share data, in photos, brief videos and excerpts from interview transcriptions and observe people’s expressions of their experiences of the pandemic in the neighborhood. Many people have contributed to the account, including a few amateur photographers who were happy to see their images of the pandemic in Montmartre ‘showcased’ in this way. Through messaging and comment functions on the account, I had additional interactions with neighbors, artists, and associations in Montmartre that I had not met in the streets. For example, a local artist contacted me about doing a collaborative project with other creatives in the neighborhood to create a gallery show featuring some of my work alongside other interpretations of the pandemic. This digital space allowed for a different kind of interaction with people, in particular, one in which they approached me to engage with the research.

This was my first experience mobilizing social media as a way to exchange with a research community and to communicate results. I have experience creating and managing research websites, but making my research accessible on Instagram created a new space for interaction. This was not a static website that presented project details, results and contact information. The Instagram account was both an arena for communicating and producing knowledge.

The ability to ‘post’ elements of the research in real-time fostered proximity between the project and members of the community (or whoever accessed the account). People could respond at their leisure, sharing opinions, feelings, or other media. This digital exchange provided a different kind of tool people could use to communicate their experiences and make sense of them. Much like Good (1994, 69) suggests about talk, these interactions were “interpretative activities through which fundamental dimensions of reality are confronted, experienced and elaborated;” shared sense-making practices in which we shared experiences of the pandemic and experienced it in new ways by emplotting these experiences into analogies, stories and larger cultural narratives. Visual/textual narration of experience on a shared online platform also allows users to revisit, archive or download content.

Part of participant observation is aligning with practices as they are happening within a community. The use of digital platforms and social media like Instagram was a way to align my methods with the current practices of some community members and the preferences of people with whom I engaged. This was particularly the case during the pandemic as use of these digital spaces increased tremendously.

Local inquiry, such as participant observation in Montmartre, of how people cope with the pandemic can prove highly relevant, as local experience, in many ways, is iconic of what others, in other places, experience. People in almost any site are increasingly connected to the circulation of global media. These global networks are embedded in local discourse and practice, feeding the chiasmus “globalXlocal”, what Fortun (2008, 13-14) describes as “a couplet of terms that are …taken as distinct or even opposed, but that…depend on…provoke…or contribute to each other.” People’s experiences of the pandemic in Montmartre are familiar to humans across the globe while being distinct to this community.

Taking advantage of these new forms of digital media makes use of the globalXlocal and creates new opportunities for transmitting and creating anthropological knowledge. It is evident that access to these technologies is unequally distributed among people globally. However, in certain settings, these sites of exchange have the potential to open new perspectives for scientific collaboration and communication. My research was enriched by the collaborative suggestions and contributions of people who contacted me via the Instagram account. The account also provided visibility to the research, within and beyond the community, and an alternative mode for any Instagram user to engage with the project.