Geography Taster - Stay home stories: pandemic geographies of everyday life

When: Monday, March 6, 2023, 4:00 PM - 5:15 PM
Where: Online

Speaker: Professor Alison Blunt

“Stay home stories: pandemic geographies of everyday life” with Professor Alison Blunt

This online session includes a 45-minute talk from an academic, followed by 30 minutes of Q&A with the academic and a student ambassador studying Geography at QMUL.

The talks provide an insight into the exciting, research-led teaching on offer in the School of Geography.

Taster session overview

The home has been at the forefront of personal, political, and public health responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly during three periods of national lockdown in 2020 and 2021.

Life at home changed in profound ways. Home became a site of education and work; shielding, self-isolation and quarantine; loneliness and new forms of connection.

Most people experienced a shrinking of their physical worlds as their lives became more contained within their places of residence. But being at home also transformed people's relationships to the places beyond their front doors - with their estate, street, neighbourhood and city, for example - as well as with other homes much further away.

Drawing on material from the 'Stay Home Stories' research project based in London and Liverpool (see stayhomestories.co.uk for films, podcasts, blog posts and maps by children and young people), this talk will focus on how people's everyday lives at home during the pandemic changed their relationships to places.

The talk will include wider reflections on geographies of home, which is the focus of an optional module at Queen Mary.