Research on and during the
Covid-19 Pandemic
The ARC Covid-19 resource list is geared towards scholars thinking through the ethical and methodological challenges and potentialities of research during the ongoing Coronavirus Covid-19 pandemic. Resources include bibliographies focused on online research, Twitter threads on the ethical challenges of scholarly research in times of upheaval, research how-tos for students engaged in online learning, and journalists’ guidelines for reporting on pandemics. ARC firmly endorses a halt to in-person human subjects research until it can be deemed reasonably safe for participants, scholars, and any other individuals/communities potentially affected by the research process.
Like many others, we at ARC are also concerned by both the drive for scholars to be productive in a time of upheaval and for them to treat a global pandemic as an unmitigated “opportunity.” People around the world are coping with dislocation, separation, illness, family responsibilities, mental health challenges, grief, government repression, socioeconomic precarity, and trauma. Within the academy, graduate students, contingent faculty, and staff in particular are facing an extraordinarily stressful time as they confront budget cuts, negotiate cancelled searches, manage extra workloads, postpone fieldwork, experience delays to publication, and delay milestones such as comprehensive exams and defenses. We hope that scholars in a position to consider research will weigh these realities before pursuing data collection during this period, and to consider the collective benefits of their proposed project versus the potential costs, including those that remain unforeseen.
METHODS AND ONLINE RESOURCES
Conducting Social Science Research During Crisis (Lauren Duquette-Rury, Wayne State University)
Covid-19 Resources (Contemporary Ethnography and Inequality Workshop, Harvard University)
The Digital Ethnography Collective and reading list (Zoë Glatt, London School of Economics)
Digital Fieldwork (Georgetown University)
Disaster Studies (Social Science Research Council)
Doing Fieldwork in a Pandemic (crowdsourced academic resource list)
Fieldwork in the time of Coronavirus (Julia Leser, Universität Leipzig)
Field research in lockdown: Revisiting slow science in the time of COVID-19 (Zahra Hussein, Laajverd)
Gender and Covid-19 Resources (Gender and Covid-19 Working Group)
Kitab Talk 1: Digital Scholarship and E-Resources During COVID19 Closures (Middle East and Islamic Studies specific)(Rustin Zarkar, UNC-Chapel Hill)
The New Ethnographer (live Q&A on research during coronavirus)
Policy Models in Pandemic (Social Science Research Council)
Social Science Research and Insecurity (Social Science Research Council)
ETHICS
Association of Internet Researchers’ Ethics Guidelines
Carrying Out Qualitative Research During Lockdown: Practical and Ethical Considerations. (Adam Jowett, Coventry University)
Kara, H., & Khoo, S. (2020). “How the Pandemic has Transformed Research Methods and Ethics: 3 Lessons from 33 Rapid Responses.” Impact of Social Sciences | LSE. 26 October. [Link]
MacLean, L., Rahman, N., Turner, R., & Corbett, J. (2021). Disrupted Fieldwork: Navigating Innovation, Redesign, and Ethics during an Ongoing Pandemic. Qualitative & Multi-Method Research, 18(2), 1–8. [Link]
Mwambari, D., Purdeková, A., and Bisoka, A.N. (2021). “Covid-19 and Research in Conflict-Affected Contexts: Distanced Methods and the Digitalisation of Suffering.” Qualitative Research. [Link].
Resources for Covering Coronavirus (DART Center for Journalism and Trauma)
University of Denver’s Sié Center discussion on viewing the pandemic as a “research opportunity”