This blog has been mostly dormant since its creation in 2020. Like Favilla and Pita (2020) reflected on their own journeys as researchers, beginning a qualitative research project that relied on interviews and field visits halfway across the world, in pandemic times, was not easy. While a body of work on remote methods, mobile probes, and digital methodologies, of course, existed (cf. Lupton, 2021), the COVID-19 pandemic brought in challenges that were hard to deal with—both for the researcher and potential research participants. In my case, the uncertainty of the time brought along anxiety in the face of the risk of infection. There were also obstacles I faced in the form of banned international travel at my university and, once those restrictions had eased, decreased mobility because of pregnancy and subsequent changes family life. Ethical dilemmas also surfaced. Was I, as a researcher, justified in intruding on the lives of potential research participants that could have been dealing with economic hardship, extra care duties of children or sick family members just so that I could complete my project within the allocated time and budget? Issues related to methodology were also concerns. In a similar fashion to what Watson and Lupton (2022) report, it was a challenge to figure out how to explore aspects of everyday life and build rapport with research participants without being physically present at the site of study. In the case of Mexico, the location of the project I was trying to get running, there were also context-specific characteristics that made the operationalization of remote or digital methods difficult. Cultural aspects created an atmosphere where face-to-face interaction with strangers was preferred over communication methods such as email. In turn, the wave of drug-related organized crime that the country has been facing since the mid 2000s (cf. Magaloni et al., 2020) has made people cautious. There is hesitancy to, for example, answer unfamiliar phone numbers to decrease the risk of extortion. This meant that, even though I adapted the project’s research design to include remote methods as best I could, there were certain research questions that I could not explore until I finally made it to my field sites in December 2022. In comparison to previous fieldwork periods, I perceived potential research participants were more at ease with digital communication outside their circle of family and friends. The use of synchronous communication methods such as WhatsApp had increased, and people had become accustomed to video platforms such as Zoom (reflecting trends in the rest of the world). I was able to establish contact with several research participants using WhatsApp and carry out interviews via Zoom once I had left “the field.” However, this was only possible after I had visited the field sites. Face-to-face interaction helped me build rapport with gate keepers and, in turn, this facilitated accessibility through the use snowball sampling. In short, adapting the research design of this project within a set budget and time frame was a difficult task, but the introduction of digital methods as complementary tools served to ease some of the challenges. However, this strategy was only successful through an understanding of the context-specific realities of the field sites.
References
- Favilla K and Pita T (2020) “When will fieldwork open up again?” Beginning a project in pandemic times. Fennia 198(1–2), p. 230–233.
- Lupton D (2021) Doing Fieldwork in a Pandemic (crowd-sourced document). Medicine Anthropology Theory. 30 September. Edinburgh University Library. Available at: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1clGjGABB2h2qbduTgfqribHmog9B6P0NvMgVuiHZCl8/edit?ts=5e88ae0a# (accessed 28 September 2023).
- Magaloni B, Robles G, Matanock AM, et al. (2020) Living in Fear: The Dynamics of Extortion in Mexico’s Drug War. Comparative Political Studies 53(7), p. 1124–1174.
- Watson A and Lupton D (2022) Remote Fieldwork in Homes During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Video-Call Ethnography and Map Drawing Methods. International Journal of Qualitative Methods 21, p. 1–12.
Smart cities in the global south 