Armchair Sociology is a series of informal ‘in progress’ conversations on key challenges either brought into being or raised to consciousness because of the coronavirus pandemic and which sociological imaginations need to get to grips with. The conversations are facilitated by Liz Stanley, with the first with Jennifer Morris and Derek Morris on time and the oddities of how it is being experienced under lockdown ‘social bubble’ circumstances by differently situated people.
This first conversation was something of a try-out, not so much of the topic, as we had email exchanged about this previously, but how best to record it. Skype was the preference because likely to be on people’s machines in different parts of the world, and Zoom and Teams among others less so. But there were some problems with two people sharing one laptop not visible when recording – in going for the midpoint, the software cut off bits of Jen and Derek in playback. We did it again – but the spontaneity and fun went. So we present here something technically flawed, but really enjoyable to have been part of. And we’ll know better next time.
The recording we made can be accessed on YouTube here.
Derek Morris is a PhD student in Socio-cultural Studies at the University of Edinburgh. He is a US Iraq War veteran with research interests in soldiers and their relation to society through autoethnography, narrative inquiry, and the Documents of Life approach. He has worked as a research assistant in GIS on a NASA Space Grant, taught ESL in Istanbul, Turkey, and received an MPhil in Race, Ethnicity, Conflict at Trinity College, Dublin.
Jennifer Morris is a freelance writer, designer, and editor in online language exam development. She is a founding member of the Communicative English Proficiency Assessment (CEPA®) and its associated research and development group in Turkey, though she lives with her partner who is a PhD candidate in Edinburgh. She is in the final phase of publishing a study in her field on the praxis of Evidence Centered Design (ECD) framework. She holds a MA in Applied Linguistics from the University of Massachusetts and her research interests include foreign language pedagogy and testing development, language policy, sociolinguistics, and institutes of higher education.
