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

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.