Catastrophic year, the slightest of gestures. Ethnographic logbook

We recount a few moments of the year 2020, the catastrophic year, set at the very beginning of the Covid-19 epidemic. We attempt to describe this extra-ordinary moment of helplessness and confusion whereby everyday life was exposed. How can we see? How does one move around to see? Indeed, one has to be constantly in motion to seize the everyday life. It would amount to nothing in absence of the ethnographic field notes jotted down day in day out, which articulate a variety of places observed, of situations unfolding, of places of expression such as in the mail and by means of SOS messages. The article is shaped as narrative sociology based on the writings of students living in severe precariousness and on the situations of families of refugees confined in hotels in the Paris region.