The session recording will be archived on the site until June 25th, 2023

This session was streamed but not recorded

Curated Track: 

Description:

The COVID-19 pandemic has created a shift in the ways feminist geographers conduct and experience their research, either removing or limiting the aspect of groundedness in fieldwork as well as in-person contact with research participants and the place-based affective and emotional experiences of research locations. The governance of the pandemic in various geographical and socio-political contexts revealed already existing issues of lack of access to health care, including mental health support, inadequate housing conditions, lack of access to technology and connectivity as well as an unfolding crisis, leaving women, marginalized groups and feminized subjects even more vulnerable than before. Addressing issues such as structural and spatial inequality, gender-based violence and precarity at the intersections of gender, race, class, (dis)ability and citizenship status, feminist research during the pandemic required adjustment, flexibility, re-evaluation and reflection on ethics, care, safety, collaboration and privilege. Adapting to pandemic-adjusted fieldwork has led feminist geographers to develop new and resourceful ways to conduct their qualitative research ethically, to develop, nurture and maintain new or already existing relationships with research collaborators and participants, but also to deal with isolation and pandemic-related anxiety, while discussing “safety” and care within fieldwork beyond the COVID-19 restrictions. Online archives, social media posts, recorded video calls, cloud-based sharing services, simple phone calls and geo-locative applications have been welcomed into the lexicon of research methods during the pandemic, while also raising issues of access to technology and connectivity tied to local contexts and positionalities.

Particularly in the case of participatory qualitative, non-representational and audio-visual research methods, the possibilities, necessities and challenges of remote/pandemic-adjusted research have posed a number of questions for feminist knowledge production and ethics regarding the researcher’s and participant’s agency, and on access to technology, care, collaboration and privacy. At the same time, the extensive use of online software and cloud based apps has increased awareness of issues of ethics and surveillance as well as of the management of metadata and big data. In what ways has feminist research adjusted to the demands of “staying productive" and conducting research under a global pandemic? And as the interconnectedness of places has unfolded in the context of overlapping crises and emergencies, what does this mean for future research methods in various emancipatory imaginaries?

For this session we welcome panelists addressing (but not limited to) the following issues:

• Possibilities and ethics of technologies and software used in remote participatory feminist research in human geography
• Adapting from place-based to digital remote or pandemic-adjusted participatory feminist research
• Digital audiovisual and textual methods in feminist collaboration
• Use of archives and social media for feminist qualitative remote research
• Futurities of digital feminist research in geography
• Feminist ethics of care beyond “safety guidelines and restrictions” in conducting remote/pandemic-adjusted fieldwork between researchers, participants and the neoliberal university
• Affective and emotional geographies of digital remote/pandemic-adjusted fieldwork
• Digital auto-ethnography (including audiovisual practices) in times of crises
• Decolonizing digital remote/ pandemic-adjusted fieldwork through collaborative knowledge production, care and accessibility
• Isolation and trauma in remote/pandemic-adjusted fieldwork

Non-Presenting Participants