Researching from Home, Inside, and the Online: Methodological Lessons from the Pandemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented challenges across many areas of work, including research. As adaptations arose in relation to the inaccessibility of sites, international travel, and other in-person dependent avenues of research, there has been opportunity for geographers to allow these pandemic-based adjustments to evolve general practice. In this article, I propose three frameworks stemming from feminist geographic methods and the dedication of the street artists I was researching to continuing their own work. I introduce researching from home to challenge and reimagine the geographer’s relationship to the field and consider the home as the spatial context of lockdown measures. I put these online methods in conversation with researching the online to highlight the plethora of material for social scientists to turn to when access to the field is interrupted. This article challenges what it means to do geographic research by presenting inclusive participation options for marginalized voices of researchers and participants to be incorporated into the discipline. In doing so, the article questions how to define the research field and how to define the home as the field.