Everyday Interactions in Public Transport Before and After Introduction of Self-isolation Regime: Experience of Moscow Metro Passengers

This research is devoted to a comparative analysis of changes that took place in everyday interactions of Moscow Metro users under the conditions of self-isolation regime during the COVID-19 pandemic. The spread of coronavirus has led to serious changes in the daily life of people. First of all, the virus itself and the control of it have had an influence on the mobility of citizens. The self-isolation regime and the introduction of electronic passes forced the majority of people to limit their movements in the city very much. It also was contributed by the closure of almost the whole public places. For those who kept moving around the city, public transport has become one of the few places to meet city strangers. Moreover, against the background of general concern and the increasing risk of getting infected in public places, the metro, as the most popular and effective type of transport, has become an anxious but inevitable place for everyday interactions. In our work we demonstrate how metro passengers perceived this type of public transport, what emotional and bodily experiences were associated with it, what their practices of interaction and categorization of other metro passengers before the coronavirus pandemic were based on, and what changes occurred as a result of it. The main interest to us are the fundamental issues of social interaction and perception of differences, which are actualized in the specific context of daily mobility. The situation of pandemic and quarantine, on the one hand, is interesting in itself, but, more importantly, it reveals unobvious and hidden patterns in the mechanisms of interaction and categorization of the Others. The study combines approaches that view the modern city as the interrelation of the mobility trajectories of human, objects and meanings (Urry, 2007), which represent the social and cultural diversity of modern daily life (Watson, 2006; Darling, Wilson, 2016; Amin, 2002). To analyze the interactions between these agents, we use Goffman's (2017) approach to understanding human behavior in public places. This work is based on a qualitative analysis of a set of semi-structured interviews conducted between 15.04.2020 and 13.05.2020 with people who were actively using the metro and other public transport before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, in order to reconstruct the chronology of the virus spreading and the actions that have been taken to stop it, we used the materials that were published in the media and on the official websites of the city authorities. We also used photo and video materials that were taken by our informants. As a result of data analysis, we are able to show how the perception of the metro by its users before and after the coronavirus pandemic has changed, taking into account the physical and emotional modes of involvement, experience of (non)safety. In addition, we identified criterias for categorizing metro passengers and the ways of describing the situational interaction of passengers before and after the COVID-19. On the basis of the collected materials, we demonstrated which details of the personal facade no longer play an important role in the unfocused interactions between strangers in the metro, and which, on the contrary, have become a new cause of violations of civil inattention. We also defined the role of new hygiene norms in changing the situational behaviour in the metro.