Covid-19: how the pandemic disrupted our way of life

Gardening, watching series, listening to music, visiting a museum online, cycling, but also keeping informed, working, taking classes... All these dimensions of personal and social life were affected if not totally shaken up by the Covid-19 pandemic. The objective of the 'Du Monde d’Avant au Monde d’Après' (MAMA) research programme was to study all these dimensions over the long term using a global approach. The conference marking the end of the programme held to present the findings and deliverables took place last November.

This MAMA programme derived from exchanges between CNRS Humanities and Social Sciences and various laboratories. It was launched in 2021 with support from the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research (MESR) in the form of dedicated funding for research in the humanities and social sciences. The same was the case for the  Health Research platform at the same time.

"There was a desire to base this work on the scientific dynamism of the Condorcet Campus with its critical mass of humanities and social sciences units working on health issues", explains Emmanuel Henry, the programme's scientific coordinator and deputy scientific director of CNRS Humanities and Social Sciences. It also represented a way of "creating a collective response and driving research" on a campus that opened shortly before the Covid-19 crisis.

Eight projects (see box) were launched in parallel with around fifty researchers taking part from 7 units under CNRS supervisory authority. The participants represent "broad multidisciplinarity with a significant diversity of approaches, themes and disciplines". These range from health geography to psychology, through history, philosophy and sociology.

Grégoire Borst and his team at the LaPsyDÉ laboratory1  have, for example, been studying the ways in which the brains of teenagers still developing their critical faculties perceive and judge the truthfulness of information. This population group is highly exposed (often passively) but had hitherto been the subject of little study. The academic explains that "the Covid-19 pandemic was marked by heightened awareness of how false information could have serious health consequences for people who are fooled".

A period like no other

The team showed there is a progressive improvement in people's critical sense as their logical reasoning skills develop when they are teenagers. A vast survey on 24,000 French schoolchildren was run in partnership with the French Ministry of Education. The findings will help researchers link discernment skills to socio-economic, geographical and academic factors like a pupil's marks at school. Interventional and participatory studies2  were carried out with over 3,000 and almost 1,000 teenage respondents respectively. These established that pupils' critical faculties are bolstered by raising their awareness of cognitive biases (though there is a risk of excessive scepticism). However, it is nevertheless preferable to inform them about manipulation techniques to reduce their adherence to conspiracy theories such as those that were rife during the Covid-19 period.

• 1Laboratory for the Psychology of Child Development and Education (CNRS/Université Paris Cité).
• 2Via the lea.fr platform which enables the joint construction of experiments and teaching tools with the educational community and facilitates finding volunteer classes to help carry out the experiments.

Cycling was another emblematic element from that period with kilometres of cycle paths opening while the health crisis was at its peak. The studies demonstrate the dual effect of speeding up and amplifying local investment in cycling policies as a short-term response to the crisis but sometimes also as an opportunity. Cycling has now become a credible means of transport in the Île-de-France region thanks to sustainable planning developments, structured networks of associations and increased budgets to encourage people to cycle more.

Other surveys on mobility have also suggested that the mass urban exodus during the first lockdown period from the largest cities, particularly the Île-de-France region, need to be put into perspective. The researchers examined previously unpublished data on French Facebook users and found that such territorial recompositions were similar to but lesser than those observed during the holiday period with an increased population on France's coasts but no particular migration towards country areas. Most of the population decline in France's urban centres can be explained by the absence of tourists from other countries and reduced mobility from the inner and outer suburbs to urban centres. A report on the subject by the researchers involved explains that "generally speaking, the mobility dynamics observed in France before, at the start of, and during the pandemic don't suggest any radical change to urban societies".

Researchers at the Ladyss laboratory1  studied the question from various angles, notably the relationship with housing, consumer behaviour, the environment, nature and the living sphere. They have shown that gardens were viewed as ideal refuges where people reconnected with nature (with the majority of respondents stating they now have a greater interest in observing birds and plants), partly to preserve their mental and physical health. In the same context they highlighted housing inequalities and the importance of neighbourly solidarity.

• 1Social Dynamics and Recomposition of Spaces Laboratory (CNRS/Université Panthéon-Sorbonne/Université Paris Cité/Université Paris Nanterre/Université Vincennes-Saint-Denis).

In France's cities and towns, the Covid period was marked by major changes in their inhabitants' relationships with nature. Access to biodiversity is now a criterion of well-being, with the practices of residents of well-off and working-class neighbourhoods becoming more similar. "We've also become more mobile as regards visiting green spaces," explains Anne-Peggy Hellequin, an academic who coordinated the laboratory's twenty or so research proposals. Alongside these elements, the constraints associated with lockdowns have raised awareness of the impact of over-consumption and overcrowded housing and led to residents 'rediscovering' the strong points of local shops but also their limitations.

In total, "tens of thousands of people took part in the surveys, either by being contacted directly or through their data from platforms like Facebook or Deezer", explains Emmanuel Henry. This extensive survey also led to many undergraduate and masters students receiving training through research. 

New formats

The MAMA programme is drawing to a close but the HSS Health Research platform's work is continuing with its website still disseminating all its publications. The platform will also go on supporting various projects working on structuring health research in the humanities and social sciences on the Condorcet Campus and further afield. The MAMA programme has helped open this platform up to other types of communication aimed at different audiences. 

The Ladyss laboratory's 'Cohabiter dans l'espace d'après / cohabiter dans le monde d'après' project targets the general public as well as local or regional authorities. A guide been designed for elected representatives who would like to set up a well-adapted cycling system for their area.

The Centre d'histoire sociale des mondes contemporains1  also ran a new exhibition on the Condorcet Campus, based on the programme's 'Maitron Health, sports and popular cultures' project. The exhibition features illustrations by Fred Sochard and spotlights key figures in opening sport up to the French working classes.

"All of this was only possible thanks to the dedicated support staff who are essential to driving the research aimed at developing the science-society interface", explains Anne-Peggy Hellequin. One of these staff members is Mary Capon, a research engineer who has worked on coordinating all the consortium's outreach projects including the Health Research platform's notebook2  on the Hypothèses site. Mary Capon explains that the notebook is designed to be easy to fill in and "aims to reflect the life of a research programme as close as possible to the field."

Informational videos and podcasts aimed at the general public have been developed in collaboration with the RUSHS business network3 . "This collaboration is a pillar for the programme. The researchers contribute their results and the network contributes their essential expertise in attractive and effective multimedia media", explains Mary Capon

Dialogues have also been developed with local stakeholders in the Seine-Saint-Denis area - around the Condorcet Campus, representatives of which also attended the November conference - and with the MESR to provide regular updates on the programme's progress. "One of the programme's central aims was to alert public decision-makers to the impact of events like a health or environmental crisis beyond the health consequences alone. So, this programme's results are likely to interest all the ministries and not just health and research", says Emmanuel Henry who hopes the discussion can be prolonged after the MAMA programme.

• 1Centre for the Social History of the Contemporary World, CNRS/Université Panthéon-Sorbonne.
• 2This carnet is now coordinated by Sarah Wicker, a CNRS research engineer working for the Health Research platform.
• 3Network of image and sound professionals under the supervisory authority of CNRS Humanities and Social Sciences