Viral Epistolary: digital collective letter-writing in time of Pandemic

As many other countries, Italy faced the most severe and restrictive lockdown measures during the first SARS-CoV-2 wave, from March to June 2020. In this period, we promoted an online letter-writing and letter-sharing community project called “Viral Epistolary” (VE). VE lasted three months, collected more than 500 letters, and connected thousands of people from all over the country. VE’s aims were to promote a digital space aimed at sharing domestic isolation, physical distancing, and pandemic experiences, as well as providing mutual and community support, by using letters as a mediation, meaning-making, and auto/biographical tool. Our paper foresees two parts. Firstly, we will present the main findings of the preliminary phase of our research, where we conducted an inter-disciplinary narrative analysis of the letters collected. Hence, we will highlight how digital and community writing can be understood as a sort of “meanwhile” liminal space. The pandemic as a social total fact is rearranged through resistance, survival, and social relationships-restoring frames. Particularly, we will see how personal and biographical resources are used to deal and understand social phenomena and how different personal and social backgrounds emerge from a shared narrative pretext. In the second part, we will discuss methodological issues related the second-ongoing phase of our research, which involves EV’s participants through new writing opportunities and interviews. The scope will be to deepen the understanding of how their experiences related to the pandemic have changed through time and within the transformation of overall pandemic social-framing processes.