Resilience processes during lockdown: a diary study from the Faroe Islands

This paper explores resilience processes during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Faroe Islands and asks how smallness and place shape resilience. Two days into lockdown, in March 2020, the author sought participants to write diaries describing their observations, feelings, and experiences of being in lockdown. Since a crisis is often understood in retrospect, the use of the diary method enabled an ongoing documentation of what people were going through, as the situation unfolded. In total, 51 diaries and follow-up interviews with one-third of participants form the basis of this study. The concept of the cosmology episode is used to analyse resilience processes as sensemaking during lockdown, ranging from sense-losing to sense-remaking and renewal. Through an initial inductive, and subsequent abductive approach, three key resilience processes were identified as being important for sensemaking: (1) naming and identifying, (2) stabilising and improvising, and (3) visioning and remaking. The study found that cosmology episodes are contextual and place-based experiences and capacities through politics, structures, smallness, spatiality, and island culture are highly significant in shaping resilience processes.