When contexts collapse: How ubiquitous video cameras in the home during COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns transformed family representation

Abstract

Utilising interviews from a range of caregivers and teachers alongside textual analysis of circulating and non-circulating videos made by children during the COVID-19 quarantine, this article examines the collaborative, experimental models of media making that emerged at this unique time. Children’s media-making practices during quarantine provided a window into and between personal dwelling spaces and private details, disrupting conventions of family self-representation while forcing a confrontation with the capitalist imperative to separate work and private life and for parents to produce, share, and monetize personal media content. This transformation in home mode media is bound up in making visible the incommensurability of home life and office labour, and the insistence of care (for each other) over careful production (of family and professional images).