Staring out my window: Reflexivity and relationality in research in a Covid-19 world

Abstract

In March 2020 I faced a research crisis. Like many PhD students, my project quickly fell apart and I was faced with writing a PhD on migration while stood still in London. In this article I explore the techniques I used to try to write about movement through conscious stasis and what this can tell us about the nature of fieldwork. I explore my attempts to answer these problems through experiments in autoethnography and communal storytelling. Both of these methods were attempts on my behalf to think through what it means to do ethical research in the face of a climate crisis and a pandemic. As such, I explore the ways in which using them changed my thinking not only about my project, but about the nature of research itself. I argue that moments of rupture such as COVID shine a light on the structuring of ‘normality’ in research. I write against a return to that normal. A normal that has justified extensive international travel in the face of a deepening ecological crisis, a normal that celebrated knowledge extraction and created material realities which governed ‘who’ the researcher could be.