One aspect of the global crisis produced by the COVID-19 pandemic was a striking spatial pattern, namely the mass confinement of people to domestic space combined with major restrictions to both mobility and access to public space. This spatial change has psychosocial implications. The material context in which people live is part of what shapes the possible range of experiences, relationships and selves to which a person has access. This paper draws on empirical mapping interviews conducted with a community sample of 46 Australians during lockdown (2021-2022) to explore experiences of personal change: new ways of thinking, being or relating which participants developed in lockdown or intended to take up in the future. These changes tended to be orientated towards similar concerns, wanting to sustain a greater focus on relationships, creativity and meaningful activity beyond lockdown. Furthermore, these concerns reflect the symbolism and activities associated with domestic space (relationality, care, reproduction, the private self), indicating that these new futures and ways of being were crafted from the ingredients available in the spacetime of the
pandemic. Speaking to the conference theme of crisis as offering both ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity’, this paper explores an example of change and transformation emerging in crisis. Arguing for the importance of attending to the material context of crises, this paper offers an example of the way that the form, meaning and symbolism of the spaces available to people in crisis mattered in shaping the content of their emergent personal transformations.

Pierra Aulagnier suggests that, beneath even primary process, exists another layer of experience that colours all subsequent meaning making. At the core of human experience, she contends, are the very first moments of needful seeking towards an other, moments that are coloured by whatever affective tones attend the encounter. At the core, then, of self-loathing and self-hatred, are the enigmatic messages passed along from parent to child regarding our place in the social fabric, making the intergenerational transmission of trauma profound and absolute to the extent that it cannot become known and reflected upon. Taking this dilemma seriously, we might be able to recognize ways in which current attacks on humanity and even meaning itself may be seen as desperate attempts to fend off the sense of worthlessness that can never be fully fended off because we carry their sources within. I will consider ways in which this type of formulation might aid us in our efforts to better understand and perhaps repair our relations with those we only further alienate through the rampant disrespect that merely fuels the need to kill off, not just the gaze, but the gazer.

This paper explores the entanglement of memory, trauma, and identity through an autoethnographic lens, tracing my experience as a Sikh woman whose grandparents belonged to Pakistan before the Partition of India. Anchored in personal history and embodied memory, I reflect on performing a childhood theatre piece with themes mirroring my own lineage—where feelings of displacement, loss, and longing linger across generations. The act of remembering, and perhaps forgetting, becomes a site of negotiation, where I attempt to name the ghosts that inhabit my body and shape my understanding of self. By interrogating the ways in which memory functions—what persists, what fades, and what resurfaces in unexpected ways—this paper examines the experience of inherited trauma and the ways in which narratives of the past inform present identities.

As a brown woman living in the UK, I navigate the complexities of a colonial history that is both personal and inherited, where the search for self is tangled in the remnants of a past that was never mine but continues to shape me. This paper considers how identity is formed through the interplay of fact, memory, and familial narrative—how the past is both collected and constructed in an attempt to make sense of what is mine and what has been passed down. In examining the tension between remembering and reconstructing, it explores how identity is shaped not only by what is known but also by what is lost, imagined, or longed for. Through this lens, it reflects on whether crisis is solely a site of rupture or if it also holds the possibility of reattachment and meaning-making.

Alan Garner, novelist and essayist, is recognised as one of the foremost British writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His early novels of the 1960s established him as an important voice in children’s fiction, a form he chose not due to the intended audience, but the necessity for distillation, a refining of style. His works articulate the circularity of history and myth through the dislocated and fractured modern self, through desirousness, loss, and impending irrevocability. In writing Red Shift (1973), Garner was inspired by graffiti he saw at the station, a footnote to a previous declaration of love: “not really now not anymore”. The novel ends with the presentation of a coded suicide note: a message to the reader, given the responsibility of saving or mourning the protagonist Tom. The ache and insouciance of an unpunctuated loss.

Garner has created a narrative poetics grounded in the landscape: writing from and within Alderley Edge where his family have lived and worked for generations, he has reflected on his sense of duty to the spatial-temporality of the Edge, describing his creativity as a “service to something beyond the self” (2024, 174). In Boneland (2012), Garner locates this sense of duty through a pre-historic, ice-age hominoid, and a traumatised middle-aged man, each concerned with the maintenance of the land in their field of vision: the ice-bound pre-historic Edge and the twenty-first century Cheshire equally at risk from loss of symbolisation. Garner’s writing therefore seeks to hold broken worlds together, his artistic position resonating with Winnicott’s idea of a creative spatiality, the transitional area of the ‘not me’ where we find ourselves. The paper responds to the conference theme by foregrounding the duty of creativity in crisis: as Garner writes, through art “we can learn. We can move. We can grow” (2024, 190).