Everything is inside the home: the boundaries of home confinement during the Italian lockdown

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the ways in which social distancing and home confinement restrictions have been experienced and perceived in the Italian socio-cultural context, in order to assess how they reshaped everyday life, and which are their social implications. Drawing on 60 in-depth semi-structured interviews, this article sheds light on the sense-making processes and the construction of inter-subjective meaning around home confinement and social distancing that emerged during the lockdown. Results support that during the national quarantine individuals had to reframe everyday practices, thereby redefining the boundaries of their experience. Indeed, individuals had to deal with a lack of personal spaces, a following stress overload and a collapse of the typical boundaries between the professional and private sphere, which required a complex management of everyday activities. Implications of these preliminary findings are discussed, as well as suggestions for future research.

KEYWORDS:

• Social distancing
• Italy
• frame
• social isolation
• home confinement

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elisabetta Risi

Elisabetta Risi is Research Fellow at IULM University (Milan). Previously, he obtained a PhD in Information Society from the Bicocca University of Milan. She has been teaching sociology and communication sciences for several years and she carries out research at the Communication, Arts and Media Department at IULM University. Her current mayor research interests cover the role of platforms in daily life, the issues of contemporary work, as well as digital and qualitative methods. She has participated and organised workshops and conferences in various universities and is the author of numerous papers on the relationship between communication practices, subjectivity and social change, as well as on current forms of job insecurity.

Riccardo Pronzato

Riccardo Pronzato is a research and teaching assistant at the Department of Communication, Arts and Media at IULM University (Milan, Italy), where is currently conducting a PhD research within the doctoral program Communication, Markets and Society. Previously, he obtained a summa cum laude master's degree (MSc) in Sociology and Social Research from the University of Trento (Trento, Italy). Currently, his major research interests cover digital sociology, critical algorithm studies, as well as cognitive and socio-narrative approaches. He has already been accepted as an author to several conferences and got published in both academic journals and books.

Guido Di Fraia

Guido Di Fraia is Associate Professor in sociology of cultural and communicative processes at the IULM University of Milan. Qualified as Full Professor in 2020, he is Pro-Rector for Communication and Innovation of IULM University. In 1986 he got a grant Fulbright as Visiting Student at UCLA department of Social Psychology (Los Angeles). He is the author of scientific articles and several volumes on communication, and methodology of social research. His main research topics deal with the socio-cultural processes connected with the digital innovation concerning both the interpersonal communication and the society.