Corporeal-affective rearrangements: auto- ethnographic spatial narratives of young Tijuana university students in a context of pandemic

Abstract

The official provision of home confinement to safeguard health against a pandemic without referents, a situation that each country assumed with varying degrees of urgency, in Mexico - in general - and on the Tijuana border - in particular - came into force in March of 2020. The education sector was one of the first to take up the recommendations, canceling activities at the Autonomous University of Baja California in all its campuses in the afternoon of March 17 "until further notice." This had various effects on the student population, which in emotional terms was expressed mostly as uncertainty. The requirement to stay at home implied social distancing, but not only with respect to proxemia between bodies to avoid possible contagions, but also the distancing towards any interaction in public space, that is, the cancellation (perhaps temporary) of all social activity. In the same way, became a hyper-coexistence with those who share the private space, forcing families to reorder times and spaces and, in this, reconfigure a new coexistence. Nostalgia for life outside and discomfort for life in confinement produced, in the same way, new forms of body-space-emotions relation in everyday experience. This article presents and analyzes the corporeal-affective rearrangements of a group of young university students from Tijuana around the pandemic at the beginning of their quarantine, by reconstructing their spatial experiences from a phenomenological and interactionist approach, through the method of autoethnographic spatial narrative.