“Interactional expectations reconfigure in the time of Covid-19 Implications for the uncertainty of social «reality».”

This article offers an ethnographic account of how interactional expectations changed in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, making it difficult for people to create social objects, and experience «reality» together in «normal» ways. The situations where people do their identity work changed, as did expectations about ordinary language use, and social accounting practices. Even the experience of space and time changed. Because new practices (wearing masks and saying «Stay safe») emerged rapidly, they were often initially unrecognizable to others, making coordinated action difficult, and increasing uncertainty. Existing inequalities of race class, and gender, usually tacit, became much more visible. In what follows, we describe situations where these changes took place, interpreting our findings through a lens suggested by Goffman, Garfinkel, Du Bois and Durkheim.