Gender and Class Inequalities in Italy Under COVID-19 Lockdown: Theoretical and Methodological challenges. Lessons from a Non-Directive Visual Research

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the management of productive, reproductive and social activities in our new everyday lives (Plotnikof et al., 2020). Moreover, it has presented new challenges when doing research about work and labour processes, from a both theoretical and methodological point of view. It has highlighted, as ever before, the theoretical necessity to overcome the binary distinction between work and life as two ontologically separate and static domains, which fails to grasp the intertwining of productive and reproductive processes and the permeability between the public and the private, as already pointed out in the literature (Glucksmann 2005, Fleetwood 2007, Ollier-Malaterre 2010, Özbilgin et al. 2011) and as belied by the domestic experiences of the lockdown lived by who worked from home. This research aims to overcome this problematic conceptualisation and contribute to the recent and more critical strand of work-life research (e.g., Carreri, 2021; De Coster and Zanoni, forthcoming), by exploring the (de)construction of boundaries during the lockdown period. We pay special attention to some macro-structural drivers of work and family life, specifically gender and family composition,social class and housing conditions, and their links to the micro-level experiences and power dynamics, which have become more clearly evident during the pandemic emergency, albeit being pre-existing. The blurring of the work-care-life boundaries in a single confined time-space during the lockdown has raised some questions about the structural interdependencies between work and ‘non-work’, with relevant ontological and methodological implications yet to be explored. In order to face the challenges of doing research during the pandemic, and in order to observe working from home experiences without assuming a binary vision and without influencing participants’ representations, we chose to conduct a qualitative study using non-directive techniques, technological tools and visual methods. The empirical material, collected during the first Italian lockdown, consists of ten video-interviews focused on academics (Carreri and Dordoni, 2020) and seventy participant-generated images (Balomenou and Garrod 2016) sent to us by workers of different sectors. We used the native image making technique (Warren, 2019; Pauwels and Mannay, 2019), which allowed us to observe reality as experienced by social actors and investigate private and public boundaries overcoming pre-set logics (De Coster and Zanoni 2019). The images were collected in April-May 2020 through an online form where we asked to upload “a single image that best represents working from home in this period”. In addition, participants were asked to provide a reason for their choice and some sociodemographic information (age, sex, family composition, profession). Regarding the findings, the participants' heterogeneity allowed us to observe the axes of inequality. Data show relevant different forms of disarticulation and re-articulation of time, space and relational boundariesin working and family life, connected to gender and class differences, linked with housing, family, care and work conditions. The analysisis still being carried out using the Maxqda and Atlas.Ti softwares, in a continuous intersubjective and remote mode, mediated by technology exchange, with the purpose of sharing analytical-interpretative categories to allow us to do research during the pandemic.