Time and space/body and face: Meeting ethnography in the pluriverse

Abstract

Meetings are our most ubiquitous form of everyday collective human engagement. The pandemic lockdowns shifted the taken-for-granted architecture of meetings across many contexts around the world, from the presumptive in-person meeting with bodies in a single space to the presumed virtual meeting with many faces, on many screens, in many physical spaces and time zones. What did this “zoomiverse” shift mean for our ways of making organization, making relationships, and making change? This paper explores the significance of meeting architecture, with a focus on what socio-political possibilities are made and foreclosed by distinct circulations of bodies and faces. What do meetings in the zoomiverse make? What is the significance of the zoomiverse? And what happens now, in what we call the meeting pluriverse, where organizers, workers, and activists must choose, perpetually, from among a seemingly infinite set of virtual, hybrid, and in-person architectures? Here is where meeting ethnography can be helpful.

I move from my laundry folding to my sofa and enter into the research workshop by pressing the button “Join” on zoom. After some time, the now well-known boxes with peoples’ faces joining in from all over the world appear on my screen. I make sure I’m muted and wait for the meeting to begin. There are some people chatting with each other for all of us to hear. A kind of public gossiping/pre-meeting chat. A friend says hello by private message in the chat. We exchange messages about our kids’ schooling. The chairperson (or “host” in zoom-language) begins the meeting by asking us to introduce ourselves. “I’m calling from Drei University.” “I’m coming in from Chicago, early morning.”

We begin with this anecdote to remind us of the pandemic rupture, and the particular event through which that period was experienced by many of us in its most regularized form: the meeting.

In this paper, we place the meeting at the forefront of the ethnographic project. Meetings are how people come together in space and time. Meeting is the mode by which we convene to accomplish our projects, to build and reproduce our worlds, and to imagine and shape our futures. Meetings are where we think together. Meetings bracket time and space, which allows for new ideas and visions to emerge (Thunus, 2023). Meetings of various sizes and shapes structure most everyday interpersonal and institutional activities, including schooling, business, worship, social life, governance, civic life, ensuring the functioning of bureaucratic institutions, and the provision of human services from therapy to routine medical care to accounting. Activists, lobbyists, diplomats, consultants, teachers, managers, and bureaucrats alike understand the importance of meetings for bridging differences in thought and perspective.

In our earlier work on meeting ethnography (Sandler and Thedvall, 2017) we largely took for granted that meetings, except in a few large and well-resourced transnational organizations, generally involve people convening together in the same time and place. This paper engages the shifts from presumptive in-person meeting worlds, through what we call the “zoomiverse” of the pandemic lockdowns, and ultimately into in the contemporary meeting pluriverse, where meeting architecture — how/where we meet — is an ever-salient variable. We focus in particular on civic actors initiating meetings in order to shift structures of power. Our paper explores particular meeting architectures and meeting practices in conditions when bridging difference, influencing power, and building new forms of agency are integral to the purpose for meeting. We put forward affective disconcertment as a theory of the role of discomfort for socio-political change. Meeting ethnography enables us to understand the concrete production of affective disconcertment, that is, how particular meeting architectures produce particular socio-political possibilities. As we settle into the meeting pluriverse, where virtual and in-person meeting forms in all their specific variations are always explicit decisions on the part of civic actors, we find that understanding the stakes of meeting architecture decisions is of utmost political importance. Robust attention to meeting ethnography is necessary for ethnographers to develop this type of finding; our paper both demonstrates and discusses this broad methodological argument.

In the next section, we describe our analytical framework in relation to meeting ethnography: architecture, practices of circulation and maker (Sandler and Thedvall, 2017). We present our method. Then, we turn to the meeting zoomiverse and consider how the framework enables us to interrogate this everyday practice in new ways. We introduce our concept: affective disconcertment. Next, we present meeting ethnography from a zoom meeting and an in-person meeting of the activist organization Massachusetts Against Solitary Confinement (MASC). We ask: what does solidarity look and feel like across different meeting forms in an organization working to end one of the most violent and destructive practices within the U.S. prison industrial complex? We ultimately consider the question of the political significance – the potential, the challenges, and the limitations – of the zoomiverse as a tool for survivors of state violence to connect with one another and inform changes to the systems that have harmed them.

The analytical framework: Architecture, practices of circulation, and maker

Our interest in meeting ethnography was initially sparked by mutual admiration of Helen Schwartzman’s book The Meeting (1989), and a desire to understand the role of the meeting in the ethnography of diverse scholars as well as in our own ethnographic work. There have been many scholarly undertakings in the past 30 years to conceptualize and comprehend the meeting as an organizational form. ¹ In recent years, with the pandemic as a backdrop, there has been a growing literature on virtual in relation to, and in comparison with, in-person meetings. In this literature, the effectiveness of virtual meetings and hybrid meetings has been at the center (e.g. Allison et al., 2015; Cichomska et al., 2015; Karl et al., 2022; Reed and Allen, 2021, 2022; Standaert et al., 2021). A particular strand of this virtual meeting effectiveness literature focuses on the causes of zoom fatigue or videoconference fatigue and well-being in virtual meetings (Bailenson, 2021; Benjamin and Andrew, 2023; Bennett et al., 2021; Luebstorf et al., 2023; Standaert et al., 2023).

While the above literature almost exclusively engages meetings through the fields of management and business, we engage the meeting and its outcomes in an anthropological register; this approach is fairly unusual not just in the literature on virtual meetings, but in the emerging field of “meeting science” as a whole. We also engage a distinct setting; instead of the corporate or bureaucratic settings that are featured prominently in the literature, we engage activist contexts where civic actors speak to power, as this type of setting involves explicit challenges of difference and power. There have been a few limited examinations of the effects of the lockdown-imposed shift to zoom meetings within activist settings, such as Arya and Henn’s (2021) examination of the impact of virtual meetings on conditions and practices of research with young activists. But, to date, most scholarly examinations of activist projects during the lockdown period take the then-novel zoomiverse context for granted, rather than engaging the significance and impact of this wholly distinct meeting modality on the civic projects in question (e.g. Gray et al., 2022).

We also put forward meeting ethnography as a particularly well-suited research methodology for understanding the meeting as a ubiquitous relational phenomenon, moving away from the more common foci on either individual experiences of well-being and fatigue or the effectiveness of meetings to engage with what meetings are and do within specific everyday contexts. We engage in meeting ethnography with the help of our analytical framework for considering meetings in three dimensions: as architecture, practices of circulation, and maker (Sandler and Thedvall, 2017).

We begin with architecture. Meeting architecture entails specific intended and possible relational experiences; it is in this way similar to how rooms, yards, or buildings are designed. Meeting design is also accessible to participants — one can “appreciate” or “feel unwelcome” in particular meeting architectures, and one can communicate this affective experience. The concept of architecture directly implies the existence of an architect; in the case of meetings there are always specific individuals/groups, generally identifiable by the meeting participants, who are responsible for the official aspects of meeting design and structure.

Meeting architecture can be about everything from spatial elements to how time, people, and activities are arranged. It is not just about how the seating and speaking structure is set up (whether it is u-shaped, circular, or theater-style; whether there are tables; whether there is a podium), but also about the choice and arrangement of objects such as projectors, paper, pens, nametags, computers, agendas, programs, coffee mugs, water bottles, and how the meeting is designed so that objects relate with one another and with participants in particular ways. We consider who, by design, is allowed to be there, what the physical boundaries look like (is the door to the meeting room open or closed? Are the walls glass?). In addition to these spatial elements of design, we notice how time is designed by meeting planners. What are the rules that govern the time of the meeting, and how are these transmitted? Is there a formal agenda? How and when are different types of participants supposed to speak, according to the design of meeting-time, and how is a person meant to be stopped from speaking? In other words, how is meeting time controlled? In addition to individual meetings, we consider the architectural design of the landscape of meetings that comprise an organization, coalition, social movement, institution, or other collective project. By considering meetings as an architecture of a project or organizational landscape, we are able to examine all the ways meetings, as a rhythm of people coming together in particular configurations, structure power, governance, relationships, and so many other aspects of a project or organization.

The second concept in the analytical framework is practices of circulation. Meetings are containers and events that circulate both tangible and intangible things. As practices, they are the actual doings in the meeting room: discussion, dialogue, debate, monologue, talk, silence, argument, interruption, exchange of written information, slide deck showing, negotiation, voting, recording, note-taking, and moving things and people about in space. When all of our ethnographic examples were in-person meetings, practices of circulation highlighted the circulation practices of physical things within meetings: people, documents, notepads, coffee cups, water bottles, food, pens, phones, agendas and minutes, computers. The practices of circulation concept also includes all the intangible things that are circulated through meetings: ideas, intentions, needs, emotions, affects, information, stories, knowledge, authority, momentum, resistance, acquiescence, apathy, initiative, discourses, concepts, past decisions, etc. We want to bring forward the concept of “affective atmosphere” (Anderson, 2009) as a useful concept to think with in terms of practices of circulation. Altogether, a meeting’s practices of circulation create a particular kind of affective atmosphere, in the sense that the ways bodies, and both tangible and intangible objects interact create the affective, experiential qualities in the meeting.

The final analytical concept in the framework is maker. Meetings are instances of collective agency — one meets for a reason, to do something — so this concept may seem so obvious that it is not worth noting. The most obvious thing that a particular meeting or set of meetings might make is a decision or policy. Other obvious things might include individual work plans, more informed workers or decision-makers, and future meeting agendas. But there are so many less obvious things that meetings make.

Meetings make individual and/or collective affects, such as pride, efficacy, joy, sadness, shame, satisfaction, hope, despair, delight, confusion, bewilderment, determination, commitment, and obligation. Meetings also make not only political decisions, but the epistemic conditions for political discourses that structure decision-making. That is, meetings make individual and collective sense, in the Gramscian sense of how particular arrangements of power and ways of relating form a “common sense.” Or they may make visible something else: an upending of the sense or way of knowing that one had presumed was held in common. This is what Helen Verran calls “epistemic disconcertment,” when “our taken-for-granted account of what knowledge is has somehow been upset or impinged upon so that we begin to doubt and become less certain” (Verran, 2013). The particular architecture and practices of circulation of a meeting ultimately make particular epistemic convergences likely, make certain relations possible, and close off the potential for others.

Meetings are both makers and breakers of social order (Schwartzman, 2017). Our determination to take meetings seriously as makers is in dialogue with Latour (1987, 2005) and his colleagues’ demonstration of the importance of considering non-human actors — from regulations to technologies to molecules — as “actants,” and the resulting urgency to reconsider and broaden conceptualizations of agency. We think of meetings as super-actants: meetings are both the things made by countless human and non-human actants (through architectures and practices of circulation as well as external events), and they in turn act — individually and collectively — to make much of our world.

In contrast to the memes positing meetings as useless (or that they “should have been an email”), we contend that it is almost impossible to overstate the power of meetings in the ethnographic and historical record of every human enterprise, from war and peace, to statecraft and governance, to technological innovation, to elite social reproduction, to resistance and revolution (cf. Polletta, 2002).

Method

As university teachers and researchers – we came into the whole zoom meeting world with a particular view. We had the above meeting ethnography framework in the back of our heads, and would talk about it with one another periodically. We were both quite accustomed to taking notes on our own everyday meeting worlds, and we both slowly realized that the near-total, cross-sector, global shift to online meeting spaces was something we might attend to at some point. We both began taking more regular notes, and collecting mental anecdotes. In May of 2021, we both attended the biannual Meeting Science Symposium (an international conference about meetings, the first two of which we attended in person), which was held on zoom. During that meeting, we both agreed to take notes (one of us focusing on talk, one on visual/space). As we talked about the meeting afterwards, we noted also how different it was for us to attend this meeting together virtually; the ability to interact with each other in real time in the chat, overlapping with everything else going on; the inability to connect organically with one another or with other participants before or after the official meeting; the extent to which we were both never fully at the meeting, as we were never disconnected from our distinct in-person worlds. We began considering what we eventually came to think of as the “accordion” character of zoomiverse architecture.

Thedvall’s experience and notes on everyday university meetings were particularly helpful for exploring our taken-for-granted lived experiences of the zoomiverse, and for realizing the ways in which this experience is not actually less embodied, but fully embodied in many different space-times; this led to our theorization of the zoomiverse as a multiverse. Sandler’s experience of activist meetings, including meetings with the same organizations and organizer colleagues before, during, and in the aftermath of the zoomiverse, emerged as particularly relevant to developing our understanding of the stakes of virtual versus in-person meetings. Sandler’s collaborative analysis of MASC’s meetings with her organizer colleague Cassandra ² helped us to consider the relevance of power and positionality to the types of relationships that can be made through in-person, one-world listening versus “accordion” encounters in the zoomiverse.

We did not conduct interviews or engage in formal fieldwork for this paper; it is essentially auto-ethnography, tracing our own personal experiences of meetings in the zoomiverse and back into the pluriverse between 2020 and 2022. For both of us, this involved regular note-taking and reflection on the many meetings in our everyday lives (university meetings for Thedvall, and activist-engaged teaching meetings for Sandler). We did not attend any meetings in order to collect data, and did not take notes with any sort of research question in mind, beyond “what are our meetings like now?”

When we convened as meeting ethnographers, we realized that our regular tracing of our own everyday meeting worlds might yield interesting insights about the unprecedented rupture in meeting architecture that so many people across the globe had experienced. We began to analyze our own experiences through the analytical framework presented above. We identified and coded the ethnographic material into the different frames: architecture, practices of circulation, and maker. In this process, we identified the auto-ethnographic example of Sandler’s experience in MASC as particularly useful to think with in regards to what meetings can make, and developed the concept of affective disconcertment as we found Helen Verran’s concept of epistemic disconcertment so resonant and useful to think with.

With the help of the analytical framework, we analyzed a recorded zoom meeting that MASC had assigned to Sandler’s university class to watch; this video was provided by the organization for educational and civic purposes, and we reconfirmed its appropriate use for this article. We also analyzed two in-person meetings with MASC, although Sandler has many years of pedagogical and ethnographic experience with these types of meetings. Finally, several brief quotes from Cassandra Bensahih,2, the Coordinator of MASC, are included based on her collaboration with us in describing MASC’s zoom and in-person meetings for a public-facing article on which she was a co-author (Sandler et al., 2024). We wanted to make clear Cassandra’s specific contributions to the iterative theory we developed for this article, without burdening her with the writing of a lengthy academic article in which she had little interest.

In sum, the arguments of this paper were made through a protracted, iterative process of moving between our meeting ethnography analytical framework, our quite varied personal experiences of virtual and in-person meeting worlds, and the theoretical insights emerging from our conversations and writing between 2020 through 2023.

Into the zoomiverse

During the COVID-19 lockdowns, an enormous quantity of meetings in diverse contexts across the globe shifted to online platforms. We call this shift of meeting architectures the move to the “zoomiverse.” This rupture in how we meet narrowed the diversity of meeting architectures to a remarkably standardized one. So - what happened? We returned to our analytical framework: architecture, practices of circulation, and maker.

In the zoomiverse, architecture includes the obvious features of the particular communications platform. But zoomiverse architecture is much more than the boxes on the screen and frequently-updated software features. Unlike the in-person meeting where there is a singular physical room that all participants negotiate, the zoomiverse meeting world is mediated through many differently-arranged screens and the multiple physical worlds of offices and homes (and parks, and waiting rooms, and cars) that the participants arrange, inhabit, and negotiate during the meeting. Participants design many physical aspects of their own experience of a zoomiverse meeting. Each person arranges their own chairs and desks, their own place on a couch in a waiting room or the floor of a toddler’s room, or takes the call from a car while parked or driving.

The platform generally does the work of arranging participants in the collective zoomiverse space. In person, it is easy to observe the significance of how a room is arranged, as well as where people are assigned to sit or choose to sit; there is human agency to be credited or blamed for the arrangement of humans in space. In the zoomiverse, the meeting screen looks different for all participants, and there is another type of human agency involved in this arrangement. Zoom’s particular interface deems that the speaker’s face and one’s own face will be visible at all times in one’s meeting room (unless one decides to hide their own face), but the arrangement of faces will look different on the other participants’ meeting screens.

In some ways, the screen architecture creates a form of spatial equality. There is no manspreading, no jockeying for power seats, no sitting in cliques or factions, no cozying up next to the boss. All have the same amount of screen-space (at least in the gallery mode). On the other hand, with one’s equal zoom-square, one must stage the self; there is no “back of the room” where one might slink down, relatively unnoticed as everyone faces the center or front of room. Everyone is aware that their zoom-box will be as visible as everyone else’s zoom-box, and that their choices will be noticed.

While of course one also makes choices about how to present oneself in person, in the zoomiverse, the requisite and standardized staging of the self — the awareness of the requirement to make specific choices about one’s equally-visible zoom-box — is more directly connected to the meeting structure. Whereas in in-person meetings most participants’ roles are to negotiate the meeting architecture, in the zoomiverse we are all architects of one small portion of the meeting space.

What does it say about a person who chooses the library from the Harry Potter movies as a background, or a beach or cityscape? What is the significance of a blurred background, or of someone whose books are organized by color in the background? Should one try to match the “raised hand” emoticon with one’s skin tone, or is it better to just keep the default Simpsons-cartoon yellow? Will going off-camera be perceived as disengagement? In place of the black-square-white-name box that takes the place of the camera view, should one place a cat meme, or a political poster, or perhaps a picture of oneself? There is also the choice to put one’s full name or just first name, to add what pronouns one goes by, and perhaps to add where one is in the world with a flag or location name in parentheses.

The time dimension of the zoomiverse meeting is ostensibly designed by the facilitator or leader who, as “host,” has a specific range of structural design powers (breakouts, mute/camera settings, recording, spotlight, etc.) with which to shape meeting time. The host’s powers in the zoomiverse determine, with greater certainty than an in-person facilitator can, the arrangement of a shared meeting. However, participants’ individual experiences of time and space are much less controlled and standardized during a zoomiverse meeting than they are in person. This is because the zoomiverse architecture is not connected to a single space-time.

Meetings in the zoomiverse are experienced by participants as an accordion meeting architecture. The zoomiverse is, phenomenologically, a multiverse: there are at least as many different space-times in a zoomiverse meeting as there are participants. Space and time are dispersed among individual physical spaces and the temporal happenings within them. Shared space-time in the zoomiverse is quite limited, comprising only a tiny fraction of the spaces and times experienced by meeting participants. The combination of the standardized zoomiverse staging and the multiverse participant meeting experiences shapes what can and cannot circulate in zoomiverse meetings.

In the zoomiverse, practices of circulation are partly determined by the lack of collective interaction among physical things and bodies. Many more things actually circulate during zoomiverse meetings than in-person meetings, but very few of these things circulate among the people meeting. The zoom architecture severely constrains how and what can circulate in shared time and space. The lack of bodies to circulate bodily engagement is the most obvious distinction; there can be no hugs or handshakes, and there is very limited engagement through body language. Participants also regulate their own bodily needs separately – no circulating shared bodily experiences of room temperature, smell, color, objects, spaciousness. It is also impossible to circulate something that is ubiquitous and crucial to in-person meetings: eye contact. In the zoomiverse, there can be no direct person-to-person eye contact, and it is impossible for any participant to know whether another person is looking directly at them, at someone else, or at something else on their screen. Indeed, one is well aware that if someone appears clearly to be looking directly at them, they are actually looking at the camera.

Notwithstanding the lack of eye contact, in the zoomiverse the face is at the center. Deleuze and Guattari write about the process of “facialization” as one of sliding into a societally standardized notion of the face, where certain sorts of faces become sanctioned as human through the projection of expressions that are legible in the dominant symbolic order (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). We were reminded of this process as we were talking about the compulsion to manage one’s face in the zoomiverse; the architecture is in a way a caricature of this process, requiring us each to “facialize” throughout the meeting (or explicitly reject this mandate by turning off our cameras). There are seldom bodies or bodily comportments to read, so managing the face becomes quite important. Emotions are in a way televised and circulated, and in a way also distanced and able to be sequestered. One can use emoticons (hearts, thumbs-up) to transmit emotion, but these are hyper-standardized. The face becomes the primary way to express feelings or manage them, and because no one can tell if their face is being looked at (or, in a large meeting, is even visible to any particular person), it becomes always potentially relevant to manage one’s face. Furthermore, while one never knows who is looking at them, one will always by default see one’s own face in most platforms, and is thus constantly reminded to manage their face and stage their background. Quite unlike in-person meetings, the constant self-staging in the zoomiverse is individual rather than relational.

The zoomiverse architecture introduced unprecedented possibilities for individual and collective multi-tasking, the circulation of multiple conversations and activities simultaneously. Like space, time is accordioned by the zoom architecture, explicit and hidden temporal layers of participant-time folded on top of one another to form the assembled experience of the meeting. “Oh, that book sounds interesting.” One opens up a page on the screen and orders the book while listening. It quickly became utterly normal to spend entire meetings on other windows and screens than the zoom-screen, reading and composing email, shopping, browsing social media, reading the latest pandemic news. Furthermore, multitasking in the zoomiverse does not only involve distinct screen-worlds. Opportunities for sanctioned and unsanctioned multitasking are designed into the zoom platform itself. The chat function provides a structure for multiple overlapping interactions that are not possible in in-person meetings, such as when people ask and answer questions in the chat while a presenter is talking, or when a co-host thanks people and shares email contacts and links to resources as the next presenter begins.

But what is perhaps more interesting are the private chats going on while the meeting is ongoing. Private chats might involve comments on the meeting in progress, explanations of what is going on in the “actual” meeting, questions of clarification, total side-conversations (separate meetings), or gossip or strategizing related to the meeting at hand. Through the chat, other ways of performing resistance within the meeting become possible, by, for example, forming chat-coalitions, or doing what was formerly thought of as pre-meeting strategizing within the ongoing actual meeting.

All of these overlapping collective practices of circulation in the zoomiverse are still quite limited; only faces/backgrounds, text, words, and links to online objects circulate among meeting participants. But objects and activities circulate behind each and every screen, within each of the physical worlds participants inhabit during the meeting. What circulates in participants’ distinct time-spaces is occasionally mentioned if it affects collective time-space (e.g. in the chat, “sorry, that’s my dog barking, I’ll let her out and be right back”), but most physical and sensory circulation goes unshared.

Participation in the time-space of the zoomiverse meeting can be performed in so many different ways in order for each participant to engage in desired or necessary individual practices of circulation. With the camera on and — if the face is properly managed — without signaling disengagement, it is possible to engage with almost anything else going on in one’s computer, such as texting, emailing, shopping, scheduling, or reading. If one’s camera is turned off and one’s mic is muted, the zoomiverse offers unprecedented private space-time for other activities, and even other meetings, to circulate outside the screen while the meeting is ongoing. One may water plants, fold laundry, prepare dinner, feed children, converse, change clothing, drive, care for animals, and clean the house while at least nominally participating in the shared space-time of the meeting.

As a result of the multitude of practices circulating in the multitude of space-times during a single zoomiverse meeting, there might be very little affective engagement with the shared space-time. Participation, especially in large meetings, often thins out as the meeting becomes background for its participants, similar to a podcast or even music. But other things thicken up: when the meeting stops circulating one’s face, one might use meeting time to make a clean house, a happy child, an exercised body. Or, thought of differently, the hidden face function makes meetings radically more accessible — not only can people who are ill, disabled, or engaged in care work access an activist, municipal or town hall meeting without having to leave their home, but now everyone can also attend such meetings without having to neglect other relational, personal, or domestic responsibilities.

In light of the distinct accordion architecture that both facilitates and inhibits particular practices of circulation, what do meetings in the zoomiverse make? What is the significance of the zoomiverse? And what happens now, in what we call the meeting pluriverse, where a seemingly infinite set of virtual, hybrid, and in-person architectures are constant options? Here is where ethnography can be helpful.

The zoomiverse brought to the fore the salience of affective relationality in meeting architectures, and has led us to reflect anew upon the complex relationships between affective atmosphere, affective relationality (or affinities), and social/institutional/political change. With the help of Helen Verran’s concept epistemic disconcertment, we put forward the concept of affective disconcertment to characterize the specific ways that psychological and bodily discomfort are utilized by civic actors in meetings with people in power. Affective disconcertment, as we shall see, is a tool for unmooring bureaucratically persistent structures of state violence; but circulating profound discomfort requires particular meeting architectures.

In the next section, we turn to an organization addressing state violence that is organized explicitly around the development of affinities and solidarities with the people affected by state violence. This project’s leaders (and meeting architects) posit a direct connection between what we call affective disconcertment and the political change they seek. They design meetings around storytelling-listening practices in an attempt to make relationships of political solidarity and accountability to people who have experienced state violence. The next sections describe this project’s meetings both in the zoomiverse and in-person, focusing specifically on how affective relationalities are made through each meeting form. In this way, we can begin to see the particular salience and stakes of different meeting architectures.

Learning from the struggle against solitary confinement

Massachusetts Against Solitary Confinement (MASC) is a small organization that aims to end the use of solitary confinement in prisons and jails in the state of Massachusetts. It is part of a national coalition of organizations called Unlock the Box, working on similar campaigns in 18 states. In each state, organizations and campaigns to end solitary confinement are led by people who have experienced solitary confinement, and their families. That is, their model of social change is grassroots, or change “from below.”

What social change “from below” means is a hotly debated topic among progressive activists in the United States and, while it takes many forms, most community organizing initiatives include a few main tenets. First, the goal is to build the power of people to shape and hold accountable the institutions that affect their families and communities. Thus “leaders” of any particular effort (or “campaign”) are people who are directly affected by a problem and are playing a leadership role in addressing it. Second, “organizers” are usually paid staff whose primary job is to build relationships that will enable the success of both the project of building people-centered power and the specific campaigns people identify as important. These relationships include those among the organization’s “base” of directly-affected people, relationships between members of the base and allies (people not directly affected but potentially supportive of campaigns), and relationships between members of the base and people in positions of power (policy makers, administrators, etc.). Community organizing is usually institutionalized in the United States through non-profit organizations (the U.S. equivalent of NGOs), which, while legally barred from “partisan” activity in the sense of party affiliation or direct campaigning for specific politicians, can and do advocate for specific policy changes.

Cassandra Bensahih, ² the coordinator of MASC, is an organizer in her late sixties. She is a formerly incarcerated Black woman without a lot of financial resources, whose everyday life includes navigating an extraordinary array of family and community responsibilities. Cassandra directs MASC through UU Mass Action, the Unitarian Universalist Action Network in Massachusetts. UU Mass Action has a generally older, mostly white, upper-middle-class, highly educated membership from its home congregational institutions. MASC’s base, and Cassandra, have little background in common with the membership of the non-profit organization that supports them. Thus, there is work to be done to bridge the gap and engage allies in the program’s struggle. Most of that work is done through meetings.

MASC’s work is fundamentally about creating meetings where people — allies, legislators, prison administrators, and other people responsible for the system of incarceration — are truly listening to the stories of people directly affected by incarceration and solitary confinement. As Cassandra says:

“You can quote facts all day - not enough guards, not enough programming. You can quote facts, but it really is about individual stories. One story can change minds…so I let them tell the stories. One of them is going to hit somebody right in their heart. All the laws, they get around those - it’s about the people who can change things.”

For MASC leaders, creating and mobilizing the storytelling-listening relationship humanizes everyone involved. Their hope is that telling their stories and having them truly heard builds the power and agency of people who have endured dehumanizing and torturous experiences at the hands of the state. For organizers and leaders in MASC, everything depends on people listening to those who have experienced incarceration and solitary confinement. Thus, storytelling and listening are what meetings are about for MASC.

Storytelling and listening are obviously possible on virtual platforms. As we were talking about this article and about how to tell the story of MASC’s work and meetings, Cassandra immediately noted that the pandemic lockdown was helpful for expanding her own connections with a national network of formerly incarcerated people organizing for change. National meetings became easy to organize and attend. She recalled relationships that she developed with leaders of the national organization Unlock the Box through their zoom meetings. Listening to survivors’ stories, across space and time, grounded organizers directly affected by incarceration more firmly in the broader national struggle against solitary confinement.

But what did the zoomiverse do for the task of creating storytelling-listening relationships between survivors of solitary confinement and people whose everyday lives are far removed from the conditions of incarceration? What did the zoomiverse do for creating relationships between survivors of solitary confinement and the people who have the power to end it? What follows is an ethnographic snapshot of one zoom meeting, the goal of which was to develop among UU Mass Action members a commitment to working with MASC toward a legislative campaign against solitary confinement.

Meeting ethnography in the zoomiverse

This meeting description is based on a recording, which was shared by the organization, of a zoom meeting of people associated with UU Mass Action but not yet involved with the MASC campaigns. The UU Mass Action attendees all appear to be well over 45 years old, with a few easily over 75. At the start of the meeting, all eight attendees except Cassandra appear to be white.

This particular meeting was about why and how allies can get involved in the fight against solitary confinement. First, a man in the top right corner of the zoom screen welcomed everyone, introduced Cassandra in top left of the screen and her colleague in top center, and then the colleague began sharing her screen to present a webinar. Her presentation involved a basic explanation of the issue, prevalence, and violence of solitary confinement, a video from a national group on the topic, and an explanation of what the group is working on in terms of writing and advocating for legislation to address the problem.

The MASC member — a survivor of solitary confinement, whose role in this meeting was to tell his story and thus create the direct listening relationship — arrived at that point. He was on his phone in a park, walking as he spoke. Cassandra greeted him, and then he talked for more than 45 minutes straight, hardly pausing. His monologue was direct and personal, shifting frequently between stories about his childhood, abusive foster homes, his exposure and initiation into violence, his introduction to experiences of police violence, his mental health challenges and lack of support, his drug involvement, his involvement with violence, his arrest and time in prison, his experience in solitary confinement, his experience with guards and abuse in prison, his healing experiences, his learning, and then back to events during his childhood. The whole time he was walking, walking, squinting into the screen with green grass and paths drifting past in the background. There was constantly-shifting background noise as well: people yelling, children playing, birds, sirens, traffic. He said once or twice that he can’t really see the participants on his phone. On the recording he appeared in gallery view, as one of the participant boxes. By 20 minutes in, one person dropped off the zoom, and there were some other signs of listening-distress – hands over faces, backing away and moving toward the screen, shifting of bodies. Two people went off-camera. Cassandra looked for those signs, and let the speaker go on awhile longer. She wanted this to be not just a sterile educational webinar; allies needed to feel the intensity of the speaker’s experience.

Finally, Cassandra cut in and started thanking the MASC member, mirroring back some things he had said and expressing her engagement and appreciation. If we really attend to the boxes in that minute or so, we can discern the relief taking shape on the screen: a couple cameras came back on, people leaned forward and looked more pointedly toward the screen, smiled, nodded: engagement. Finally, after the speaker left, there was a bit of time for participants to share their thoughts with one another, and for Cassandra and her colleague to share details and gain commitments to participate in future actions to support MASC’s campaigns to address solitary confinement through policy legislation.

The point of developing the consciousness and commitment of allies is so that they might become active in demanding policy change. MASC also involves meetings at many other levels, including meetings with legislators and their staff (as we will see below), and with prison regulatory committees. But all of MASC’s meetings attempt the same thing: to circulate firsthand narratives of individual experiences of solitary confinement and related forms of torture in prisons and jails. The goal of such circulation is to create meetings that make significant enough consciousness shifts among people in power to spark change to the system itself. But do circulations of first-hand stories in the zoomiverse have this effect? We can’t know precisely the effect of this zoom meeting on the UU Mass Action participants. Did they call their legislators? Did they tell their friends? But we do know that their discomfort was experienced privately. As they listened to a survivor of solitary confinement, these possible allies were able to mitigate their discomfort in any way they chose, from tuning out fully, to somewhat distracting themselves by pacing or looking at another browser window, to co-regulating with other creatures in their personal space rather than fully immersing in the chaotic storytelling onscreen. Cassandra also offered an analysis of the limitations of the zoom architecture for these meetings:

“On zoom legislators or people in power, they have the option of not being seen. And you know they’re in the room. For the RHOC, they’re on zoom. But can you really judge what they’re feeling? Looks like sometimes they’re bored…”

Furthermore, the zoomiverse architecture limits the bodily accessibility of MASC to people in power. As Cassandra notes:

“[Zoom] also gives them a reason to not show up. But if you make an appointment [in person] you know you’re going to see them. It’s different when you’re there - you can connect better. Zoom does not take the place of [that connection].”

Moving into the legislator’s office

In spring 2022, MASC entered the meeting pluriverse, and my (Sandler's) community organizing students were invited to come along. MASC had co-written two important legislative bills to reduce the use of solitary confinement and close loopholes in earlier prison reform legislation. Both bills were stuck in committees, unable to get traction. It wasn’t that legislators disagreed with them, just that they were not prioritized in the midst of pandemic, inflation, housing crises, health crises, and the many other events in the U.S. that receive media attention — and that are more directly connected to legislators’ core base of constituents. The challenge for MASC was to make people in power listen and shift their priorities toward ending the regularized torture taking place in state prisons.

In the pluriverse, meetings take place in a wide variety of architectures. Cassandra engaged in a long series of different kinds of zoom and phone-based meetings with MASC leaders, UU Mass Action members, me (Sandler), my students, state legislators sponsoring the two bills, and colleagues in the Unlock the Box national organization, in order to plan a series of in-person meetings at the Massachusetts State House that might make momentum that could not be made through the zoomiverse alone. We will share a bit of the first in-person visit, so we can contrast Cassandra’s meeting methods in the pluriverse with those in the zoomiverse.

Throughout our 45 minute drive to the State House with MASC member C and two of my university students, Cassandra was simultaneously planning with me about the upcoming meetings at the state house, telling the students stories about past campaigns and her current organizational context, and engaging in voice-to-text exchanges and phone conversations with several MASC members and UU Mass Action colleagues. It was something of a whirlwind, all of us witnessing Cassandra’s own meeting pluriverse, right there in the packed car. As we arrived, she spoke on the phone with another MASC member, R, who was ill and unable to join us in person after all. Cassandra told R to stay by the phone, promising that she would call her when there was a chance for her to tell her story.

Once inside the State House building, we were ushered into a large conference room. We met with J and D, two research staff of the chair of the public health committee where the solitary confinement legislation in question was stuck. J and D were earnest-looking men who appeared to be in their mid-30s. They wore business suits; one was white and the other Black. Each shook my hand. J made complimentary comments about my university, and invited me to sit next to him. I declined vaguely and sat at the far end of the room. My students saved the nearest seats for Cassandra and C, as we’d agreed. Again, Cassandra began talking immediately, telling story after story about the torture MASC members had experienced in solitary confinement. J and D took notes at first, projecting the professionalism and diligence of their roles as research staff. They asked questions during pauses in the stories, trying to get Cassandra to talk specifically about the bills she had come to advocate for. But she would not. She just shared more stories, and at some point there was no more for J and D to write. They had to simply listen to the narrative as it careened from one shockingly unjust story to another. No looking away. I saw my students shifting, trying so hard to keep their bodies still. Later, we talked about how we were all just focusing on our breathing and listening, grateful for our masks and our unseen faces.

At many points, J and D seemed overwhelmed, perhaps conscious that they had to try to control their faces, which were visible because neither was masked. D’s eyes would bulge out, J’s jaw would go slack, and they would breathe audibly. Finally, Cassandra announced that she was phoning the MASC member, R, and placed the phone in front of the legislative staff, on speaker. R picked up and immediately told her own story for about 10 minutes. It was incredibly moving, violent, infuriating, and sad; the students and I were all struggling, our breathing deep and intentional, eyes lowered, keeping ourselves under control. The legislative staff were slack-jawed, fully overwhelmed, heads shaking. They took refuge again in their note-taking, which enabled their bodies and faces to focus on something.

After the phone call was over, they asked Cassandra about some of the specific policies that ran through R’s stories. Now that the listening had taken place and the legislative deputies had been moved out of their technocratic orientation, Cassandra allowed the mood to ease and shift toward the details. Cassandra and C took turns explaining the history of several previous policy reforms to solitary confinement, and how these reforms had backfired or been ignored in practice. Cassandra was full of facts, suddenly. Once the story sharing and listening was done, she was totally willing to share specifics in order to help people in power play their role in the campaign to end solitary confinement.

Discussion: Zoomiverse as multiverse

MASC’s in-person meetings with legislators and their staff circulated similar information and stories as the zoom meeting with UU Mass Action allies did, but with quite different relational effects. Whatever was made by the zoomiverse meetings was only mediated by the storytelling; the relationship to the story was curated mostly individually, by each listener. There was no collective affect in which each participant was compelled to take part, no co-regulation that pulled people into new relationships. When we came back to the in-person meeting rooms, the difference was clear: tensions, demeanors, difference, and overwhelm became part of the collective experience. Time and space were not one’s own to manipulate for oneself; each body mattered, each noise mattered, each room’s dynamic was co-constructed. Participants did not have a choice but to navigate and contribute to the affective atmosphere of each meeting.

Putting the meeting itself at the center of ethnography, as we have demonstrated here, makes it possible to see something important about how people power works in the particular context of civic action in the United States. Meeting ethnography is a way to ground abstract questions about power, difference, and the possibility of civil society to transform state violence. Through our analytical framework considering meetings along three dimensions — as architecture, practices of circulation, and maker — we are able to understand the zoomiverse as a multiverse, with an accordion architecture of space and time that changes entirely the practices of circulation. While limited discourse and the image of each person’s face and/or name circulated in the onscreen universe among participants in the meeting, there were near-infinite possibilities for independent circulation of artifacts, bodies, noises, physiological reaction, discourse, reading, writing, eating, and any number of other tasks in the world behind each screen; that is, the physical place behind each screen, and the other windows within each screen, were each relatively independent universes. From this realization and our own auto-ethnographic experiences of early zoomiverse meetings, we noted also the extraordinary salience of the face in the zoomiverse, and how the affective atmosphere of shared bodily presence is absent. MASC meetings show how these shifts changed the rules of the game for those working “from below” to address state violence.

Meetings make particular relationalities: connections, affinities, resentments, factions, collectivities, hierarchies, boundaries, tensions, alliances, obligations, solidarities, and so on. The relationality-making power of meetings is particularly salient for our inquiry into the significance of the zoomiverse, and what insights we carry with us to the pluriverse. Relationality-making is also what is most important for Cassandra Bensahih, and for the MASC leaders who have survived state torture: how can they use meetings most effectively to create a storytelling-listening relationship that mobilizes people to commit to ending solitary confinement?

Helen Verran’s concept of epistemic disconcertment refers to the cognitive discomfort of realizing a profound difference between one’s own and another’s ways of understanding reality. In contrast, affective disconcertment can be thought of an experience of profound bodily and psychological discomfort at being confronted by the difference between one’s own everyday experience and another’s. It is the experience of being “hit right in the heart,” as Cassandra says, by the enormity of a personal story of torture in MASC’s case.

But being hit right in the heart can be quite painful. The zoomiverse’s accordion architecture offers many options to avoid emotional pain and discomfort. Accordion time-space is effectively a multiverse – a thin shared world with multiple private participant-worlds. The many time-spaces provide too many opportunities for people to “check out” when the listening becomes difficult, and too few opportunities for people to connect deeply, and somatically, with another’s story.

The storytelling work of MASC enables us to reflect upon the near-impossibility of the zoomiverse architecture for holding meetings that bridge significant perspectival and experiential difference. MASC storytelling, at its best, aims to make people uncomfortable enough with the status quo that they will do what they can to change it. They tell stories of torture to provoke affective disconcertment, a psycho-somatic response to difference that transcends the cognitive comprehension of this difference.

In MASC’s context, the experience of very different people listening together as connected bodies in the bounded, (relatively) single-world space and time of the in-person meeting mattered. It opened up possibilities for connection, for becoming profoundly affected by a story, for relationships of political accountability across enormous differences. In sum, the in-person meeting opened up a sense of possibility for socio-political change that was not opened up by similar meetings across difference in the zoomiverse.

By following MASC’s meetings from zoomiverse to pluriverse, we were able to engage a more theoretically mature ethnographic question about meetings: what socio-political possibilities are made through different meeting architectures? We put forth the concept of affective disconcertment as a way to understand one salient difference that the accordioned space-time architecture and the affective atmosphere of lacking bodily presence created in the zoomiverse in relation to in-person meetings. In short, we learned that the zoomiverse offers a comfort and familiarity that we suggest inhibits the dramatic shifts in consciousness that civic actors work to create through their storytelling.

Conclusion: Engaging the meeting pluriverse

We have always been in a meeting pluriverse. The pandemic lockdowns, and our near-universal immersion in the zoomiverse for a period of time, elevated the stakes of meeting architecture and highlighted the particular salience of space, time, body, and face for distinct meetings’ potential to make particular things. This paper has suggested how particular meeting architectures produce and foreclose particular socio-political possibilities, using the zoomiverse rupture spurred by the pandemic lockdowns to explore what difference meeting architecture makes for a grassroots civic organization focused on ending solitary confinement.

The zoomiverse facilitated all kinds of new relationalities across space and time, and it also foreclosed the space for particular affective relationalities and intimacies. In contrast to the zoom meeting, in-person meetings with people in power offer more promising relational interactions. In person, the quality of relationality – of seeing and being seen seeing, of listening and witnessing others’ listening – is obviously intensified. The ability to arrange bodies in space to create a particular atmosphere, the ability of the facilitator to discern what is happening with the listeners and adjust her timing in turn, the listeners’ inability to tune out because their bodily listening practices are visible and they can see their reactions being witnessed, all enable the listening-sharing event to produce a relationship to the issue at hand — in this case, the racialized violence of solitary confinement — and the people who experience it. Such relationships also bear far more accountability in person.

As meeting ethnographers, we were surprised at how thinking with, about, and through meetings enabled us to understand particular aspects of the pandemic lockdown for human projects and relationalities. In particular, we found ourselves struck by the forms of relationality particular meeting architectures make possible and likely, or unlikely and impossible. Why do some meetings produce particular sociopolitical possibilities, while others reproduce stable bureaucratic norms and structures, and yet others prove sites of conflict and tension?

Our work here suggests that it may be particularly helpful to consider how faces and bodies matter in starkly different ways within different meeting architectures. What can, might, and will be circulated within and across the expanding pluriverse of particular meeting architectures? And what does all of this say about human relationality?

Meetings make many things — affects, the boundaries and discourses that circumscribe projects, collective understandings of internal hierarchies, norms of accountability, senses of belonging and motivation, and more. But relationships across differences of power and privilege are different than relationships among people operating within the same struggle or structural position. In-person meetings seem to be especially important for making meaningful relationality among a group of people where there is significant difference in power or positionality. The feeling of discomfort that accompanies relating across difference is a profound tool for building meaningful solidarities across difference. And without sharing time-space, it is difficult to sustain discomfort.

We suggest that the potentially transformative experience of affective disconcertment — that is, profound discomfort — is far more easily accomplished when people experience a meeting space together, with their whole bodies, breathing through the same moments.

And although it may seem obvious that in-person meetings have greater potential than virtual ones to bridge differences, we put forward our meeting ethnography as a way to distill and make visible what makes this a truth.