Qualitative and Digital Research in Times of Crisis

Abstract

The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic presented opportunities to engage in collective reflection about doing research in a continuing and unfolding global public health crisis. Focusing on qualitative and digital methods and taking “crisis” as a turning point for reflection, reflexivity and positionality in research methods and ethics, this volume particularly explores qualitative, arts-based and digital methods, while reflecting on researching in “fast” and “slow”, recurring and longer-term crises. The volume’s 15 chapters draw on experiences and reflections of 33 researchers doing diverse research amidst the pandemic, from the UK, Ireland, Nepal, New Zealand, Australia, Puerto Rico, Gaza, Nigeria and Guatemala. The contributions consider researching across different locations, highlighting research and researcher positionality, methodology, reflexivity and ethics. Different types of connections are made, surfacing ethical and creative dialogues across researcher-researched relationships and settings. The methods discussed in the chapters include ethnography, autoethnography and autonetnography; ‘digital kinning’; therapeutic ‘arts-based research and auto-ethnography’; creative museum practice connecting First Nations and Indigenous creators; phenomenology; participatory action research; and take in critical, feminist, decolonial and transformative approaches.The transnational dimension of this book forms an appropriate backdrop for rich and complex discussions of methods and ethics across the chapters. Concerned to go beyond an exploitative or extractive crisis epistemology, the overall volume looks towards an ethics of responsibility and connection that is responsive and generative in times of crisis.