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Digital research methods and online spaces have emerged as a central site of engagement of knowledge productions in pandemic times (and most likely will remain so). Switching to the ‘field’ and in-between ‘fields’ via digitally mediated means confronts scholars with new sets of challenges. In this seminar, we will critically explore, how online contexts and digital research methods function as substitutes or alternatives or complementary tools to research methods in the physical field. Which opportunities and what kinds of new biases and exclusions are created through a focus on the online world and online research methods? Who can reach whom through online methods and who is excluded? Digital research methods and subsequent research ethical navigations in terms of process, situatedness and embeddedness are not novel (Howell 2021; Tiidenberg 2020). What might be novel is the scope and scale of a potential digital turn in academia as many of us ‘rethink how many academic practices might take place in virtual environments’ (Carrigan 2020, Das and Ahmed 2020). A digital turn in academic practices and encounters allows us to bridge financial constraints, time management challenges as well as concerns of sustainability while at the same time exposing us to new work-life balance and research ethical challenges due to digital scholarship. Suffice to mention issues of traceability and informed consent, governmental surveillance technologies of online spaces or hacking of cloud-based collaboration platforms. (See Hantrais et al. 202; Chowdhry et al. 2020) But more fundamentally: research phenomena, vocabularies, spaces, tools, relationships and interactions are reshaped, are hence in need to be consciously reflected upon and carefully re-calibrated, not only but also when entangled with pandemic (re)productions of inequalities, silences and emergencies. What do we need to rethink for research collaborations when decentering knowledge productions within the Global South as well as between Global North and South in terms of authorship, ownership, risk assessments, divergent positionalities, existing as well as compounded volatilities and precarities? What praxis of research ethics is linked to such interrogations, cognizant of more than often asymmetrical relationships with ‘facilitating researchers’, allegations of data extractivism, digital divides, gazing? What does it imply to revisit notions of care, reciprocity and relatedness beyond pandemic times as many scholars have called for in these pandemic times? |
