COVID-ized Ethnography: Challenges and Opportunities for Young Environmental Activists and Researchers

Dena Arya,Matt Henn

doi:10.3390/soc11020058

Abstract

This article offers a critical and reflective examination of the impact of the enforced 2020/21 COVID-19 lockdown on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with UK-based young environmental activists. A matrix of researcher and activist challenges and opportunities has been co-created with young environmental activists using an emergent research design, incorporating a phased and intensive iterative process using online ethnography and online qualitative interviews. The article focuses on reflections emerging from the process of co-designing and then use of this matrix in practice. It offers an evidence base which others researching hard-to-reach youth populations may themselves deploy when negotiating face-to-face fieldwork approval at their own academic institutions. The pandemic and its associated control regimes, such as lockdown and social distancing measures, will have lasting effects for both activism and researchers. The methodological reflections we offer in this article have the potential to contribute to the learning of social science researchers with respect to how best to respond when carrying out online fieldwork in such contexts—particularly, but not only, with young activists.

Highlights

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has had a major impact on youth-focused research, the study of youth environmental activism
In the unprecedented times of the 2020/21 COVID-19 pandemic, young environmental activism has necessarily undergone a process of relative transformation and has materialised online as a response to social distancing and lockdown measures
The following discussion considers in detail some of the key themes that have emerged from the process of designing the matrix for this particular research project. It gives focus both to relationship-building with young activists and to the ethics of online research. It explores the themes of visibility, online spaces as a site of activism and the link between the pandemic and environmental concern that emerged as challenges and opportunities to the activists-as-research-participants

Summary

Introduction

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has had a major impact on youth-focused research, the study of youth environmental activism. The UK went into a lockdown on 23 March 2020 at which point all mass gatherings in the UK were made illegal as part of the Coronavirus Act 2020. This resulted in a fundamental shift to the way in which environmental activism could take place in public spaces. Ten days prior to the lockdown, youth led climate strikes across the UK, part of the global Fridays For Future (#FridaysForFuture) day of strikes, were cancelled. Wahlström [2] and colleagues go as far as to say that ‘no youth movement has had such a global reception before’ The COVID-19 lockdown presented considerable— fundamental—challenges to the youth environmental activist community as well as to those who research it

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