“How am I going to finish my fieldwork on time?”, “Will I be able to do fieldwork?”, “Should I start thinking of alternative methods to conduct my research?”, “Will I be able to do it?”, “How will my research participants respond to alternative methods?”
These are some of the many questions that most early career social science academics continue to struggle with, as COVID-19 thrusts our world into chaos, leaving in its wake a series of new restrictions and limitations.
However even as the pandemic has found its way into our lives, it is equally true that various researchers have also found their way through the pandemic. There is no dearth of scholarly material in the form of journal articles, opinion pieces, personal blogs, webinars, and podcasts where the academics have engaged with this issue from various angles. There is also a wealth of resources about how to use alternative methods for fieldwork.
Many academic institutions responded to the Covid-19 pandemic with a combination of new ethical guidelines, travel bans and halts to face-to-face research with research participants. In response, academics have been busy sharing interim (or perhaps long-term, even?) strategies for remote research, via interviews on Zoom and Skype about how to conduct social media-based research and make use of online diary entries kept by research participants. The adaptiveness in research methods shows the resilience of the research community and it is certainly heartening to see the novel ways in which researchers are re-skilling and re-adapting – even maintaining social networks and strengthening social ties across new distances. However, these also pose questions about how to adapt the long-established ethical practices into these alternative methods, and new ethical questions have also emerged from using these methods.
The Young and Emerging Scholars (YES!) of the IGU Commission on Gender and Geography organised a webinar where these questions were tackled. The discussion took place on 29th July 2020 and was part of YES!’s monthly webinar series. The guest panelist for the discussion was Assistant Prof. Yasmin Ortiga from School of Social Sciences, Singapore Management University who shared with us her experience of research in the times of Covid-19. This was followed by a group discussion on ethics and fieldwork during a time of pandemic. Two key points emerged from the discussion: tackling the challenges and the implications of shifting to a virtual mode of research and the need to rethink ethical engagement with the field in the current global scenario.
Shifting to a virtual mode of research: challenges and implications
One of the major differences in shifting from fieldwork to virtual methods of research, is the change in geographic setting of research.
We found that this poses multiple obstacles. Feminist research is heavily based on immersion in the social world of participants, where often connections are made with the research participants by forging in-person relationships through familiarity and trust. This is important given the sensitive nature of research feminists sometimes engage in. Furthermore, the geographic setting of fieldwork provides a level-playing field, where the researcher and the participants are able to overcome their differences.
For example, one of us is involved in a youth activist-based research in India and will need to set aside time to engage with activist groups to become fully accepted members. This immersion is critical to occupying an insider position that enables us to be more reflexive and sensitive of our competing identities, ethical dilemmas, and the tensions between institutional and activist goals. It involves not treating the research as just data that is “out there for the taking”, but might include being involved in the everyday and mundane activities of the research participants, including taking minutes and notes for the activist groups, creating webpages or simply taking part in moving furniture for meetings, or sitting down in informal meetings for a spontaneous cup of tea. All of this is impossible to achieve when research moves online.
While there are no easy ways to overcome the differences in geographies between the researcher and the participants, one of the ways to reduce this gap could be the use of a research assistant from the field. During the webinar we also discussed how existing research could remain productive even if it is being conducted remotely provided there is logistical support to connect between multiple research sites and data security concerns are also met. However, conducting new projects remotely can be more challenging unless the researcher has already built strong working relationships in the field site during previous projects.
A research assistant could help the researcher with setting the interviews, providing a conducive environment (including a safe venue for interview) to the participants, and in troubleshooting technical problems during the interviews. They may also be an avenue of human contact for the participants. Yasmin, who has worked with fellow collaborators/ assistants for her research drew attention to this point - her collaborators have been vital modes of contact by establishing and strengthening chains of connections with the participants in her site of fieldwork, i.e., Philippines. This also led to a discussion on the transformation of how the research is conducted; i.e., who becomes the gatekeeper in these renewed modes of knowledge production as the researcher sees the site through the reports and materials generated by the collaborators.
In addition to this, we conferred that feminist research often includes participants whose lives are, and may be for some time to come, in turmoil because of the pandemic. Our research will also need significant ethical adjustments. The ethical context is made more complex when there is a significant digital divide between researchers and the communities they research. It is thus important to remember our privilege and positionality as researchers who can conduct interviews from the comfort of our office/room, while our research participant may be struggling to survive in a very different and challenging context of pandemic.
Re-thinking ethical engagement
Valentine (2005: 485) reminds us that “the danger is that the rubber stamp of an ethical committee can both bureaucratize ethical reflection and also lull us into forgetting the need to take responsibility for thinking ethically on a day-to-day basis”. There is no better time to reflect on these thoughts than the ongoing pandemic. Changing research methods from fieldwork to digital methods may also pose a challenge for researchers in terms of getting clearances from the Institutional Review Boards (IRBs). IRBs may provide broad guidelines but these do not necessarily address the new ethical questions and contexts researchers may find themselves in.
This thought made us reflect upon the different IRB policies that vary from institution to institution and how challenging it can be to plan for every possible scenario. In this situation, it becomes even more important for researchers to critically reflect on every move they make before, during, and after their interaction with the participants. One possible circumstance we thought of was what if our research participants become infected? How would we handle such a situation? Of course, the first step is to stop research, but what are our ethical duties to the research participants, and those who have assisted us in the field?
There are no easy answers to any of the questions we ask but all of us agreed that we have a personal responsibility as feminist researchers to ensure that our research timelines and plans make time and space for ethical research. During a time of pandemic when we are forced to conduct research from a distance, it might be easier to forget our moral accountability to participants we may not meet in-person. We are committed to making sure this does not happen.
Reference
Valentine, G. (2005) Geography and ethics: moral geographies? Ethical commitment in research and training, Progress in Human Geography, 29, 4, 483-487
Balawansuk Lynrah and Ananya Bhuyan are PhD candidates of the Department of Geography at the National University of Singapore (NUS).
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