While the all-encompassing nature of large-scale crises dominates the news, small-scale, localised, and less newsworthy forms of crisis occur continually, altering people's lives and creating unexpected change. The OED defines crisis as a ‘decisive stage in the progress of anything’ (OED, 2021). I see crisis here as a point of change, or a series of events, that disrupt the social world, introducing a period of uncertainty.

This chapter is based on the ethnographic part of my doctoral research in 2018– 21 exploring the potential of a collaborative co-housing project to disrupt the social and spatial boundaries of inclusion/exclusion of intellectually disabled people. Designers, artists, and architects collaborated with members of a supported housing provider to co-create interdependent and supportive neighbourhoods together with people with additional needs. Invested in ideas of ‘housing the social’ (Nimble Spaces, nd) and civic engagement, the project developed as a pilot project to explore housing for residents with diverse abilities in Callan, Ireland. National housing shortages were exacerbated by the 2008 financial crisis and policy austerity impacted social housing. There was therefore a need to build alternative options for people with support needs beyond large, congregated residential facilities (HSE, 2011; ILMI, 2019).

However, during my fieldwork, a series of unexpected crises stalled the project and impacted on my research. The emerging stories changed from focusing solely on building new homes towards the experience of negotiating and adapting to the changes and transitions occurring. The situated and deductive research practices of ethnography facilitate shifting directions in research as a response to changes in the field (ASA, 2020). As a result, my research aims and objectives turned from focusing on the project alone towards a consideration of the ideas and values that informed it. Opening up the research questions in a changing environment allowed me to consider what was, is, and might be. In this chapter, I am interested in the potential of ethnography as a reflexive and flexible research method and to explore its potential to facilitate my negotiated response.

Co-production and collaboration

Nimble Spaces began as a collaboration between Camphill Callan, Workhouse Union (formerly known as Commonage), and their neighbours.

Introduction

This chapter explores my experience of researching lived experience during a global pandemic. I used hermeneutic phenomenology with a careful approach to methods and ethics. The chapter discusses my lived experience of research, the difficulties I faced in the COVID-19 pandemic, and how these were resolved through methodological and ethical reflexivity.

Hermeneutic phenomenology research is the study of lived experiences – a study of humanness within humanistic parameters (van Manen, 1990). Humans, due to their dynamic nature, experience time and space differently. Birth, life, and death are common to all humans; however, time and space define their lived experiences subjectively with vividness. The study of human experiences within contextual phenomena, defined by time and space including body and mind, is called ‘human science research’.

My interest in human experience motivates me as a human science researcher. I am exploring research ethics from the perspective of how social scientists experience being ethical, as researchers. In the first week of December 2019, I planned to commence my research. Coincidentally, COVID-19 started to hamper daily life of people in China (Wang et al, 2020) and soon after the global pandemic emerged. The ensuing lockdowns rendered me unable to continue the proposed research as planned using face-to-face interviews and field notes. So, I started to explore alternatives.

In this chapter, I reflect on my own experiences as a hermeneutic phenomenological inquirer during a period of global crisis. Broadly, it is framed in two sections: the first discusses researching the lived experiences of others, and the second considers the consequences of my positionality when interpreting texts.

Researching lived experience

I always wonder, how can I investigate the experience of others as I live it? How can I transcribe all lived experiences and interactions in a textual form? But, to hermeneutic phenomenologists, lived experience consists of four dimensions: time, space, body, and mind. Researching lived experience means asking how social/human science researchers make meaning of their contextual existence (Frechette et al, 2020). For me, it was an opportunity to understand the knowledge-constituted world of my participants, who are researchers embedded within their own research. Assessing my participants’ lived experience was a way of understanding their world. It was also an approach to learning from their experiences.

Introduction

This chapter concerns how we navigate the decision-making process in research: how do we decide to do research or not in a time of, or in response to, an external crisis? It is a questioning process, drawing from reflexive approaches in different disciplines. Concerned principally with research of contemporary practices, it challenges the researcher to consider whether action is better than inaction; speed better than contemplation; and to what end and for whose purpose she pursues research.

In the 1990s, working as a young theatre producer, I attended a workshop on time and task management which proposed a mantra to ‘do less, better’. In 2020, at a loss for how to proceed, I tried to consider what such ‘doing’ would be, what constituted ‘better’, who might gain or lose by doing ‘less’. I formulated a reflexive questioning strategy built around time, purpose, and legitimacy for my research decision-making, offered here. This enabled me to sift through perceived usefulness, conflicting needs and demands, actual beneficiary impact or the notional ‘impact’ pursued by the neoliberal academy (Belfiore, 2015).

To start. All research is an act of decision-making

To choose to give this time at this particular time to this topic in this way is both multiple decisions and one. How we disseminate research – to publish, to collaborate, to protest – is a decision of how and with whom we ‘share knowledge’ (Smith, 2012). Our decisions are shaped by a range of influences: our social position, political motivations, our relationship to the field we research (Berger, 2015). As I write, I reflect on intersections between our personal and working selves in our research motivations. Which bit of my self is ‘doing’ research? I wonder which bit of my research decision-making is pulled by, and pushing back at, the institutional drivers to ‘perform’ our research in the ‘right’ way at the ‘right’ time in the carelessness and silo-ed branding of academia (Lynch, 2010; Tähtinen et al, 2016; Blackmore, 2020).

All research is decision-making in which the researcher makes implicit and explicit choices informed by pre-articulated values and processes

We form toolkits for thinking which we adapt as our research life advances. I deliberately avoid the term ‘career’. Having had multiple ‘careers’, I no longer believe my working life is in any way as linear as the term suggests.

Introduction

Digital technologies give researchers new opportunities to access the most personal thoughts of those who use them. The ethics and implications of using data from peoples’ everyday interactions have recently become a mainstream topic of concern (Lucivero, 2020). In some contexts, such as governance, it can be argued that algorithmically-generated decisions are valued over individuals’ and communities’ expertise (Danaher, 2016). As with other projects described in this book, our work is being carried out during the COVID-19 pandemic. The crisis has highlighted the ethical complications that occur when vulnerable individuals requiring information are surveilled in a rapidly changing environment. Currently, worldwide legislative changes are determining how data-intensive technologies, including forms of data collection and surveillance, are used. Recent history indicates that once the initial threat has passed, legislation remains and becomes the ‘new normal’ (Lodders and Paterson, 2020).

Organisations, including universities, are establishing mechanisms for collecting and managing stakeholder data, which will remain in place after the pandemic. The collected data will become part of the hidden curriculum, the subtle messages students receive about what an institution values, and the nature of the power relations inherent in its interactions (Kayama et al, 2015). In this chapter we outline and engage with the ethical practices involved in performing such data collection, with a particular focus on the use of chatbot transcripts.

We particularly highlight the impact of crisis scenarios on ‘information anxiety’ (Blundell et al, 2014) in undergraduate students and evaluate the potential of chatbots as a tool to improve information literacy. Chatbots can be used to enable individuals to seek information ranging from functional to personal, including information that may be sensitive or personal in nature. As students adapt to the new normal of education during crisis, individuals can suffer from information anxiety as they seek assurance to help deal with new and changing circumstances. In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, these include increased digital learning, increased working off-campus, and increased social isolation. Information overload (Soroya et al, 2021) can contribute significantly to information anxiety as organisations seek to provide guidance and support across many different topics. This can result in confusion if it is difficult to search the information that a given individual prioritises. In times of crisis, the need for tools that increase information literacy and enable effective filtering becomes apparent.

Once, at an informal gathering with other young married couples who would later become close friends, the discussion of undergraduate experiences came up. This gathering was held in the living room of one of the couple's houses and was packed to the rafters with all six couples and two toddlers. I was perched on the edge of a foldable black chair, sandwiched between my wife and Sterling, father to one of the girls gently assisting a toy horse navigate the perilous landscape that was the living room floor.

As the extroverts in the group vied for speaking time, I retreated into myself for a moment, taking the opportunity to reflect on my experience at university. Suddenly – to my mind at least – I heard someone snarl, “Those Ayy-shhiann students”. As the only ethnic minority in the group, my ears immediately pricked up as I noted that the source of this rant was from Liesl, mother to the more rambunctious of the two little girls. Liesl continued her story, voice animated and arms gesticulating wildly. Apparently, Liesl's undergraduate experience had not been quite as pleasant as others in the group. She continued, lamenting how completing projects with Asian international students was one of her worst nightmares – alas, she explained their reticence in class and inability to communicate clearly meant that she was always in charge of the group; that she was in charge of getting all the work done.

I sat there listening, completely aghast. As I felt the physical discomfort of my sitting position metamorphose into equal parts psychological and emotional discomfort, I shuffled awkwardly in my seat. Liesl, however, did not seem to notice this. Did she not realise what she was saying, and to whom she was saying it? Did she not realise that I was once one of those international students?

As she persisted with her tale, I felt a sense of rage and indignation bubbling under the surface. How could I respond? Would I address the racialised undertones of her essentialising comment? Would I suffer from momentary deafness and ignore the comment entirely? Would I pull Liesl up and in so doing, unsettle the jovial atmosphere that evening? Was there really a compromise between any of these extremes? I had mere milliseconds to decide before the moment passed.

‘Times of crisis’ brings to mind unexpected, unprecedented circumstances that appear suddenly. Yet ‘crisis’ has somehow become commonplace. The word ‘crisis’ has two roots – one denotes ‘a vitally important or decisive stage in the progress of anything; a turning-point’, which in more recent use implies a sense of ‘difficulty, insecurity, and suspense’ (OED). The other, connected root meaning relates this sense of turning point specifically to disease, a critical point when a patient might get better or worse (OED). This dual sense is useful to think with, as this book was written during the global COVID-19 pandemic. Researchers were severely impacted by its effects, even as other diseases, economic and political crises, conflict, climate catastrophe and connected ecological crises of wildfires, water shortages, flooding, and hurricanes continued to occur. The pandemic presented an opportunity to call for engagement in a process of collective reflection and to think about how research might get better (or worse), and how we might think of methodological problems and solutions, discomfort and comfort, dis-ease or ease in the conduct of research. We edited and published three e-books rapidly, in the midst of the continuing and unfolding global public health crisis (Kara and Khoo, 2020 a,b,c). These rapid publications, and this volume, now sit alongside other collectively created responses, such as the crowd-sourced advice on doing fieldwork in pandemic conditions collected by Deborah Lupton (Lupton, 2020) and the rapid review conducted by the UK National Centre for Research Methods (Nind, Meckin, and Coverdale, 2021).

This volume takes time to reflect on qualitative and digital methods, taking ‘crisis’ as a turning point for reflexivity and positionality in research methods and ethics. Its 15 chapters draw on the experiences and reflections of 33 researchers doing diverse research in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, from the UK, Ireland, Nepal, New Zealand, Australia, Puerto Rico, Gaza, Nigeria, and Guatemala. The editors’ geographically diffuse interests and networks probably influenced the character and spread of the contributions in this book. Many concern different locations as ethical environments, making different types of connections and ethical and creative dialogues across researcher-researched relationships and their settings.

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic marked 2020 with a range of challenges for researchers and any projects they had going. For example, material culture research is inherently location-based with many objects accessible via museums and collecting institutions like libraries and galleries or among the creators in communities and studios. With cultural institutions having to close in order to protect staff and the public and community borders shut to protect vulnerable populations, it would be reasonable to think that it would be no longer possible to conduct material culture and collections research. However, by shifting the examination of objects away from museums and towards a more practice-based exploration, material culture research can continue in new and innovative ways. This chapter explores the method of practice-based research in material culture studies during a time of crisis and all the benefits as well as ethical considerations that need to go into its execution. Practice-based research can be an effective method of exploring and learning as long as one understands the necessary cultural and ethical considerations.

For researchers engaging in material culture projects, practice-based research is the act of physically creating works in order to become informed about and educate themselves about the techniques of construction. Crucially, it is not the re-creation of museum objects, nor is it a lens into understanding people's motivations or desires. It is not a wholly phenomenological approach where understanding of an artist's subjective processes is attempted. Instead, practice-based research develops a greater sense of how to appreciate the works found in museums collections through understanding the physical actions involved in creation. The physical skills and Indigenous technologies that exists within each work are connected to researchers in profound ways.

Although this chapter is fundamentally about research practices, it must also acknowledge another aspect of the COVID-19 crisis which this writing addresses. The pandemic adversely affected Indigenous peoples across Australia. Cut off from seeking out community members, fear for Elders vulnerable to the virus and the sudden cessation of normal connections to our families and friends created an environment where many were locked inside their homes.