Relational Ethics of Care in Pandemic Research: Vulnerabilities,Intimacies,and Becoming Together-Apart

Abstract

In this article, we draw upon the ethico-onto-epistemology of feminist new materialisms to reflect on our experiences as feminists doing research on women’s embodied experiences of sport, fitness, and well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic. For qualitative researchers around the world, COVID-19 presented a radically changed research environment. For many, the shift to doing digital interviews required the navigation of unfamiliar technologies and experimenting with different strategies for establishing connections through computer screens. As feminist scholars, working together and with the participants during times of increased stress and uncertainty prompted us to reimagine our ethical research practices. In this article, we engage and extend Rosi Braidotti’s writing on affirmative ethics and offer our personal experiences of grappling with the affective intensities of pandemic while doing ethical feminist research. Through this creative inquiry, we describe supporting one another through research and illustrate how the unique intersections of work, family, health, isolation, and exhaustion were influencing our own and participants’ lives differently. Engaging with Braidotti’s writings on affirmative ethics in the posthuman convergence, we illuminate the ways that our digital-material experiences and the human/nonhuman aspects of the research processes were re-turning our ethical considerations. Researching together, with a focus on creating space for the voices of women who have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19, we found moments of hope and joy as we creatively imagined expansive potentials for feminist research, fostered through caring collaborations.

Keywords

new feminisms feminist methodologies methodologies critical inquiry Braidotti affirmative ethics pandemic

Skin shining The question stirs me

Refracting blue light Memories, feelings, long suppressed

Yearning to reach out Words bubble, raw and unfiltered

We sit here, together, alone Held like precious objects with her kind eyes

Over the past 2 years, the pandemic has greatly altered women’s personal, working, family, and communal lives. Since early 2020, research has revealed that women have not only been taking on additional responsibilities to care for their families and broader communities (Özkazanç-Pan & Pullen, 2020; Power, 2020) but also disproportionately experienced greater economic, social, and health concerns when compared with men (Masselot & Hayes, 2020; Paskin, 2020). Consistently adapting daily life to adhere to quickly evolving risks and government protocols responding to multiple strains of COVID-19, many women developed creative and communal solutions in their attempts at supporting the health of their families and communities (Jeffrey et al., 2021; Manzo & Minello, 2020; Motherscholar Collective et al., 2021). As women face daily health, emotional, and economic challenges while navigating the tense political and social climate that surrounds this global health crisis, the cumulative affective result is a shared experience of exhaustion (Braidotti, 2020).

Like in other sectors, the effects of pandemic were felt unevenly by women working in academic institutions. Importantly, the economic and emotional toll of pandemic disproportionately affected those in precarious work (i.e., teaching assistants, early career researchers, administrative and support staff) (Buckle, 2021; Docka-Filipek & Stone, 2021). In this article, our focus is on women academics who experienced challenges as they navigated the pressures of doing research during a pandemic, often confined to their homes. Women academics lost their jobs at much higher rates when compared with their male counterparts (Aldossari & Chaudhry, 2021; Boncori, 2020; Newcomb, 2021). They also took on additional roles in their home and working lives which, consequently, may have contributed to reduced publications by women during the pandemic (Augustus, 2021). For many social scientists, adjusting research to adhere to social distancing protocols resulted in dramatically different research processes, including moving from in-person to digitally mediated methods (Clark & Lupton, 2021; Howlett, 2022; Jeffrey et al., 2021). Beyond the demands to upskill and learn unfamiliar digital platforms to accommodate research in online environments, feminist scholars have also been faced with different questions in their ongoing efforts to conduct reflexive and ethical research amid a global health crisis. In pandemic times, some feminist scholars are questioning what it means to do ethical research and are calling for a more relational ethics of care (Bozalek et al., 2020; Branicki, 2020; De Coster, 2020).

In this article, we describe how feminist scholars have previously understood ethics and bring this into a discussion that revolves around a necessary shift in our own feminist research practices. Through evocative writing, we hope to prompt reflections about the complex affective and relational experiences of both researchers and participants during pandemic times. Inspired by recent posthumanist scholarship, we were prompted to reconsider what it means to do ethical and relational feminist research when we are separated by time and space, yet intimately connected through our shared experiences of pandemic. Put simply, this article offers our own affective, embodied, and ethical reflections on doing feminist research through the COVID-19 pandemic.

Literature Review: Rethinking Research Ethics in Pandemic Times

Questions of ethics have been at the forefront of COVID-19-related research. This is particularly the case for medical and health research that has had utmost urgency, with speed in medical treatments, vaccines, and policy responses having the potential to save many lives. In this context, some made the case for “pandemic ethics,” advocating for “risky research” to facilitate fast science that may ultimately save lives (Chappell & Singer, 2020, p. 1). Questions have also been raised among social scientists as to the ethics of doing research during a pandemic. For some, doing pandemic-related social research on/with human subjects is morally unconscionable, adding additional burden when people are exhausted, stressed, and thus highly vulnerable (Bell & Green, 2020; Buckle, 2021; King & Frederickson, 2021; Oleschuk, 2020). For others, responding to the radically changing social, political, economic, and emotional landscape of pandemic times is the work of the social sciences and humanities (Braidotti, 2020; Fullagar & Pavlidis, 2021; Lupton & Willis, 2021; Özkazanç-Pan & Pullen, 2021).

Through the process of doing research during pandemic, both familiar and previously unthought questions of ethics are emerging for some social scientists. According to Marino and colleagues (2020), to answer the question of “how can we ethically research ‘the social’ in times of social distancing?,” we must first ask ourselves whether our research is “beneficial, collaborative or necessary” (p. 36). Reflecting on social scientists’ engagement with research ethics during the pandemic, Surmiak et al. (2022) identified three main approaches: nothing has changed, opportunity-oriented, and precautionary. In so doing, they concluded that the pandemic presents both “an opportunity and a threat to the ethicality of research” (p. 213). Despite important contributions to reflecting on and rethinking research ethics during the pandemic, our focus is on feminist questions of knowing ethics differently through and beyond COVID-19. In so doing, we might add a fourth category to Surmiak and colleague’s (2022) typology, that is, feminist scholars who are approaching research ethics in pandemic times as if everything has changed.

Feminists in academia have long considered the ways that doing research requires care ethics as integral to research praxis. Inspired by such scholars as Gilligan (1982), Harding (1987), and Noddings (1984), feminist academics have worked to incorporate an ethic of care into their methodological practices to ensure that hierarchical power relations between researcher and participants are minimized, and relationships based on trust and kindness are prioritized. An ethic of care, alternatively known as care ethics (Toombs et al., 2017), prioritizes interpersonal relationships and the value of benevolence in all interactions (Gilligan, 1982). Ellis (2007) described relational ethics of care as “ongoing, uncertain processes,” adding that when working with others, “one is never finished making ethical decisions” (p. 17). Importantly, relational care ethics in feminist research exist as an ongoing process of decision-making and continually influence choices throughout the design and implementation of any study.

Although feminist researchers have long prioritized care ethics, doing research during a global pandemic has prompted some feminist scholars to reconsider the meaning of ethics, trust, and care for both participants and collaborators (Dupuis, 2022; Howlett, 2022; Pereira, 2021; Roberts et al., 2021; L. Taylor, 2020; Wahl-Jorgensen, 2021). Fostering care and trust in relationships remains a priority in feminist research; however, building such relationships in times of social distancing, and navigating the challenges that arise alongside extended periods of lockdown and isolation, presented different ethical considerations. Reflecting on her experiences doing housing research during the pandemic, Buckle (2021) described the traumatic and therapeutic effects of conducting interviews on sensitive topics with participants and revealed the challenges she faced in balancing her roles as an early career researcher and mother (e.g., conducting interviews on the roof of her rural residence). Downing et al. (2021) research with therapists described the ways that fostering a sense of safety and care online demanded intensive focus and “dynamic interactions between humans, objects and technologies” (p. 7). As feminist materialist scholars, we have considered the human and nonhuman (i.e., objects, environments, technologies, animals) aspects of women’s lives during the pandemic, and in the research process (Jeffrey et al., 2021; Thorpe et al., 2022). In this article, we extend upon this work, examining not only what is required for multidimensional care but also what is meant by the term relational in new materialist feminist ethical scholarship. To do this, we situate our discussion in the context of our recent research with women working in the sports and fitness sector in Aotearoa/New Zealand during pandemic.

Digital Interviews With Women Working in Sport and Fitness

The reflections shared in this article were prompted during our research with women working in the sport and fitness sector in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Our aim for the study was to explore women’s emotional, affective, economic, and ethical respondings during the early stages of the pandemic. For this project, digital interviews were conducted with 17 women over Zoom between September and November 2020. Questions focused on the women’s embodied experiences before, during, and after an extended period of lockdown in Aotearoa/New Zealand lasting almost 8 weeks through March and April earlier that year.

The women interviewed occupied a range of roles in their home and working lives. They were mothers, aunts, sisters, daughters, estranged and single, living with family and on their own, and working full time and casually throughout the early stages of pandemic. They held a range of professional roles, including studio owners, managers of national sport teams, contracted trainers, yoga teachers, and professional athletes competing at national and international levels. They were a range of ages (18–65 years) and ethnicities, living in varied home environments and arriving with different socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds. Although we had worked with some of the women in previous research projects, some were also relative strangers prior to our interviews. In their experiences, the women described moments of shared exhaustion, hope, care, and isolation as affective intensities that included human and nonhuman materiality. During the dialogue with the women, our own lived experiences were unexpectedly making their way into our interviews. These moments of shared intensity through screens, and the after affects felt while sitting alone after leaving Zoom calls or reading transcripts, inspired us to more deeply consider the importance of rethinking relational ethics of care in pandemic times.

As researchers, we arrived in the project being of a similar age, but experienced very different home, work, and family environments. At the time, Allison was a research assistant living on her own in an apartment in a small mountain town. After living in Aotearoa/New Zealand for more than 6 years, she journeyed to Canada amid pandemic and faced extended periods of social isolation, job insecurity, and a disconnection from her established community in Aotearoa/New Zealand. She was finding solace in nature and regular breathwork practices, but the worries of economic instability as an early career researcher were present during her hikes and river swims. The affective intensities of solace and stress filled her days.

As a full-time professor and as a mother of two young children, Holly’s everyday life was greatly altered by pandemic. Her days were spent navigating homeschooling, child care, teaching, supporting her postgraduate students, and collaborating with colleagues as they worked across time zones to meet publisher deadlines. As someone living with a chronic lung condition, much of her emotional energy was spent calculating and navigating the risks of herself or family catching COVID-19. Despite regularly feeling overwhelmed by the calamity of the pandemic, she continued to find and hold onto moments of joy with her children, yoga alone in her bedroom (behind a locked door), and walks in the native Aotearoa/New Zealand bush. For both of us, the pandemic evoked a range of affective intensities, yet research conversations with other women and collaborations with our feminist colleagues (facilitated via Zoom and Google Docs) were a much valued source of connection and care. Through our feminist collaborations and practices in pandemic research, we began re-turning what it means to practice relational care ethics during these times. While others have written about the importance of feminist (materialist) collaborations during the pandemic (Bozalek et al., 2020; Metcalfe & Blanco, 2021; C. A. Taylor & Gannon, 2022), we found particular hope and inspiration while reading Rosi Braidotti’s (2020) writing on affirmative ethics in pandemic and began considering how affective, material, and digital influences were entangled in our experiences of relational care.

Theoretical Framework

Braidotti’s (2018) affirmative ethics is “a joyful ethics” that “rests on an enlarged sense of a vital interconnection with a multitude of (human and non-human) others” (p. 221). Ethical values informed by affirmation are those that increase relational capacities. They are embodied and embedded practices that inspire freedom, joy, and potential (Braidotti, 2018, 2019, 2022). Importantly, an affirmative ethics “does not deny pain, trauma and violence, but rather proposes a different way of dealing with them” (Braidotti, 2018, p. 222). In pandemic times, we find increasing relevance in Braidotti’s affirmative ethics, as an ontological framework that inspires us to imagine how we can collaborate with human/nonhuman others in “the composition of affirmative relations” (Braidotti, 2018, p. 224) that inspire different possibilities.

Reflecting upon our experiences doing research with women during the pandemic, and inspired by Braidotti’s (2020) writing on affirmative ethics in pandemic, we were prompted to consider the human/nonhuman dimensions of relational ethics of care and how these can influence research practices in pandemic times. As Braidotti (2020) wrote, while “we” as “all living entities—share the same planetary home,” we also “differ tremendously in terms of our respective locations and access to social and legal entitlements, technologies, safety, prosperity, and good health services” (p. 3). Therefore, while “we” may be more intricately interconnected through digitally mediated platforms, there remain differences in our experiences that demand consideration of power in ethical research relations with humans and nonhumans.

In addition to an increased awareness of the ways in which our lived experiences are interconnected with human/nonhuman materiality, the pandemic also contributed to different affective experiences that greatly influenced our own and other women’s everyday lives (Fullagar & Pavlidis, 2021; Jeffrey et al., 2021; C. A. Taylor & Gannon, 2022). In Braidotti’s (2020) writing, she describes the oscillating affective experience that accompanies what she defines as the “posthuman convergence” (p. 1). Caught in this posthuman convergence, whereby we are simultaneously experiencing the chaos of environmental decline and the potential contained in technological progress, we are faced with unique challenges, and also great opportunities, for becoming together in digital spaces during increasingly complex contemporary times.

Braidotti (2020) describes the characteristics of posthuman convergence that offers suggestions for applying affirmative ethics during pandemic. She details six insights that may inform ethical action; these include principles around neoliberal governance, multinatural epistemologies, decolonial practices, and embracing difference. While it is beyond the scope of this article to adequately incorporate all six of the principles outlined, in this discussion, we focus on feminist materialist-inspired re-turnings and embodied understandings of relational care ethics in pandemic. Furthermore, consistent with Braidotti’s (2020) posthumanist approach, affirmative ethics, as a theoretical framework, is always in a state of becoming, evolving alongside lived experiences that are continually arriving. Taking this into consideration, we reimagine the principles of relational care ethics and describe how they too require ongoing expansion during pandemic, taking on different meanings when situated in feminist materialist research. In the section that follows, we offer evocative reflections, revealing some of the affective intensities that prompted us to return our understandings of relational care ethics during pandemic times.

Feminist Relations in Pandemic Interviews: Shared Intensities and Digital-Material Care

As various feminist new materialist scholars have explained, more artistic and creative modes of representation can be fruitful in evoking the material-discursive entanglements of more-than-human encounter (Fullagar et al., 2021; Jeffrey et al., 2021; Lupton, 2020; Thorpe et al., 2020). Taking inspiration from this scholarship, as well as prior research that engages creative methods to articulate complex relational experiences (e.g., Gale & Wyatt, 2009; Pinar, 1994), we present our reflections in a nontraditional format, intentionally bringing researcher and interviewee side by side, blurring the boundaries of researcher and researched. Through this creative representational style, we encourage multiple ways of reading across, down, together-apart. In so doing, we hope to reveal the unique affective experiences that oscillate between seemingly disparate intensities and prompt reflection on how digital interviews during pandemic have the potential to reimagine and challenge hierarchies, exposing contextual vulnerabilities and intimacies for researcher-participants (as entangled relations), sharing intimate aspects of pandemic life through pixelated transmission:

The list of questions As I await for the screen to alight

linear and one-dimensional Suddenly I feel nervous

stiff on the page What will she ask of me

Tidying my room quickly How deep will I go

Filtering the words How deep can I go

of other women before and after It all feels very raw

before logging in Nervous as to what will spill out

to find her waiting of me

We begin together We sit together

with formalities across time and space

Our eyes absorbing in our homes together-apart

much more than the words her bed, clothes neatly stacked

Our homes, hers and mine my backdrop . . . less tidy

personal spaces, now shared Books and papers strewn

Welcoming each other Coffee cups and cereal bowl

into this moment, together nestled around my keyboard

Sensing her nerves As remnants of full days

I share some of my own journey working from home

filtering some, for her sake Children arguing in another room

and mine Pressing mute

Smiling now The conversation warms up

the pace changes, and we riff I am babbling

off one another Am I saying too much?

Journeying/opening Surprised as to what is flowing

where/when Where did all this emotion come from?

we both choose, to give Bottled up, over months and months (years?)

or to hold So focused on each day

My job, what is it again? Trying to make it through

Listening, prompting, Moment to moment

nodding, connecting All the days

through screens warping, merging, distorting

Her story of hope Her eyes are kind

and joy I feel her warmth through the screen

sorrow and grief No feelings of judgement as a tear

The longing and loss of it all slips down my cheek

Her words Wiping it away with the back of a palm

open wounds of my own not ashamed, just surprised

Generosity of time At how much has gone by

sharing deeply how much feeling

I am grateful to be with her how much this hurts

But who am I Amidst the pain

to hold her words a memory of watching

unable to reach out waves through my window

touch her hand finding solace

provide comfort amongst chaos

Sharing this moment An hour passes, maybe more

In time, guiding us back The dialogue is drawing to an end

The interview outline Not sure how all this fits

stares back at me into her project, on women

a map we did not need on me, with her, with others

conscious of energy levels Hoping to have helped, but also worried

my third zoom call to have confessed too much, or said too little

dwindling, exhaustion How much sense and logic can be made

creeping, doubts as the storm continues to rage

Words of thanks are not enough Left in this room now

for her trust in me With just my thoughts and a cold cup of tea

Opening up and sharing What has passed

lives and livelihoods between us, across our screens

of women in pandemic A week later, maybe more

We sign off and I worry memories and emotions, triggered

that she is now alone both comforting and confronting

as am I in strange ways

Hoping she is okay The transcript arrives

reaching out an invitation to read and respond

expressing gratitude too raw, ignored until

to speak again a follow-up email

if and as needed Opening the document

more than words on a page My words of grief and trauma

more than an interview guide Pain and worry

or transcript but also the people and places

shared moments of joy

emotion and connection

An Ongoing Dialogue: Feminist Relational Ethics of Care in Pandemic Research

Through our ongoing inquiry, during shared and independent research projects, we began to return our feminist understandings of ethics, as respondings to the pandemic. Importantly, the unprecedented, and oscillating, affective intensities we experienced during pandemic research were not only felt in online interviews but also resurfaced many times throughout the research process (i.e., during online team meetings, analysis, and writing up). Therefore, this reimagining of ethical practices is not intended as a guide that feminist scholars engage only in methodological practices, but as a recognition that our research is entangled with our everyday human/nonhuman relations as feminists, teachers, colleagues, family members, and contributors in wider communities. Below, we share three key respondings that continued to resurface, describing how they expand upon previous understandings and relate to Braidotti’s (2020) recommendations for affirmative becomings in pandemic times.

Vulnerabilities

In our ongoing questions around ethics, we continually returned to vulnerability. It is common practice for ethics committees to require a discussion of “vulnerable populations” (those at risk of harm or exploitation) that may be negatively affected by the research or who may need further support during or following participation (Bracken-Roche et al., 2017; Hurst, 2008; Lange et al., 2013). Following due process, we ensured that all of the women in our study were fully informed of their rights, that they could withdraw at any time, refuse to answer a question that did not feel comfortable, and could take a break at any point. They also had the option of follow-up counseling if/as needed. However, as we began our pandemic research project, the lines between who was considered vulnerable and who was unaffected became unclear, and as our interviews progressed, we came to understand that most individuals were existing at the edges of their capacity, and all were experiencing increased vulnerability. From the initial design of our research, we were aware of the sensitivity of the project, yet our understanding of vulnerability continued to evolve and deepen as the research and the pandemic progressed.

In feminist scholarship, vulnerability has been discussed as a sensibility that can inform research practices and an embodied ontology that can broaden awareness of ethical relations with humans (McClelland, 2017; Murphy, 2011). Murphy (2011) draws upon the work of feminist scholars Judith Butler (1990) and Adriana Cavarero (2000) to describe the complexity of vulnerability as a corporeal experience that opens humans to the potential for both wounding and care. Murphy (2011) wrote that “corporeal vulnerability is at once an ontological turn and an ethical provocation” (p. 589). During pandemic, these understandings take on different meanings as humans come to terms with bodily limitations, the threat of illness, and potentially death. Increased corporeal vulnerability to contagion, and emotional vulnerabilities during times of heightened stress and uncertainty, further influenced our attention to vulnerability as a feminist practice. Such considerations influenced our methods, and prompted renewed understandings of vulnerability as a fluid and dynamic state that each of us is continually navigating through pandemic life (Clavijo, 2020). While previous feminist literature has examined vulnerability through predominantly humanist frameworks, here we expand to consider how pandemic research cultivated posthuman understandings of vulnerabilities that included human and nonhuman materiality.

In our research, recognizing the importance of building trust and relationships with participants, we shared aspects of our own pandemic lives during digital interviews. This was not a strategy to prompt participants to “give more” of themselves, but rather something we navigated differently in each interview, and in relation with each participant. In doing so, however, we noticed that these varied intensities and shared intimacies in our conversations were requiring an acceptance of vulnerabilities that we had previously not experienced, at least not to this extent. Our prior experiences in interviews with women in a range of settings (i.e., girls and women involved in a range of sport and fitness; women with disordered eating and related illness; in disaster and conflict zones) included active listening and empathy. We had practiced what McClelland (2017) described as “vulnerable listening” (p. 338) with our physical bodies being present in interviews that involved heightened emotions as well as challenging and/or sensitive content, but our digital pandemic interviews were different in a range of ways.

The experience of vulnerability was heightened as these online conversations required not only empathy and an understanding of the experience of the other but also a recognition that we too were with them in the pandemic experience. This added dimension of sharing our own traumatic and stressful experiences prompted affective respondings that differed from many prepandemic interviews. Similar to Averett (2021), we experienced these interviews as intensely emotional experiences, and also recognized the potential support and release that was found through sharing pandemic moments. When reading transcripts, connecting with participants, meeting with research team members, and cowriting our findings, the resonance of memories shared remained in our minds and bodies, triggering familiar and strange connections with the human and nonhuman aspects of our own lives. At times, words shared with participants were a source of comfort, but at other times, conversations prompted concern and distress, unearthing painful respondings to pandemic life, and futures filled with great uncertainty. These varied intensities prompted us to reevaluate our assumptions around vulnerability and who/what to include when thinking about vulnerable populations in research settings.

During a global health crisis such as COVID-19, the entire population might be considered vulnerable, though the extent of vulnerability is varied and nonunitive. Writing in pre-COVID times, Butler (2012) described varied understandings of vulnerability as felt by researchers of crisis and suggests that their “nearness” (p. 134) to suffering, whether geographical and/or emotional proximity, can influence the extent that a scholar feels ethically obliged to design and produce caring research. As women living through the gendered impacts of the pandemic, we were directly affected by the crisis; therefore, our considerations of vulnerability shifted from thinking only about the risks of the research for our participants, but also for ourselves, each other, and our research collaborators and colleagues. Working with feminist materialisms, we were also prompted to consider the broader sociomateriality of such vulnerabilities.

Braidotti (2020) described the pandemic as influencing all human and nonhuman materiality, thus shifting the ways that we relate with others. In times of social distancing, moving through hopes and fears associated with pandemic, our relational lived experiences became fractured, but also deeply intertwined. Through our research, we came to recognize and appreciate what Braidotti (2020) describes as “webs of ever-shifting relations” (p. 3), and began shifting our definition of vulnerable in the awareness that women in our local and global communities were similarly, and differentially, moving through challenging times. Approaching each of our interviews, we prepared ourselves to encounter women dealing with a range of challenges, and we tried to bring care, respect, and empathy to all such encounters. We were practicing “vulnerable listening” (McClelland, 2017, p. 338), listening through our bodies and being open to the affective intensities evoked when talking about women’s lives in the pandemic. We also worked toward posthuman listening, attuning to both the human voice and the nonhuman aspects (i.e., space, objects, nonhuman others, such as birds, wind and rain on the window, shadows and light, dogs barking) of the interview encounter (Downing et al., 2021).

Attuning to broader sociomaterialities influencing our project, we came to appreciate that there are unique vulnerabilities that are faced when opening the home space to a digital research encounter. Research that is situated in homes of participants has been shown to be both beneficial and challenging as the participant may feel more comfortable in their home environment, but may also open themselves up to increased vulnerability through welcoming another into their intimate space (Bashir, 2018). During our digital interviews, these experiences of feeling vulnerable when opening home environments to be witnessed by another were multidirectional, with both our participants and ourselves sharing human and nonhuman aspects of our private spaces. In most instances, the sharing of the home environment was carefully managed with both participants and researchers choosing where they set the computer and thus what the camera captured, but there was also a spontaneity of the digital interview during periods of social isolation with flatmates, family members, and pets occasionally making appearances. Welcoming an interviewer into these personal spaces (during busy and stressful times) was an act of generosity of our participants which we reciprocated while sharing aspects of our own home environment.

Building upon and extending previous feminist scholarship that recognizes the emotional toll of doing “sensitive research” (Clavijo, 2020; Dickson-Swift et al., 2007), we acknowledge that vulnerability transcended the distinctions between researcher and researched. Through our pandemic research, we understood that those within the research team (ourselves and others) were also living through challenging times, and we approached collaboration and coauthoring with heightened feminist sensitivities. In doing so, we worked to push back on the expectations of the neoliberal university, instead prioritizing care, and trying to support other academic women to continue their research trajectories, but at their own pace and with kindness, compassion, and understanding. Vulnerability in pandemic times, and in research, required us to acknowledge that all actants (human/nonhuman; participant/researcher; colleagues/collaborators) are emotionally exposed and deserving of relational care.

Digital-Material Intimacies

As feminist scholars of the moving body who have previously found deeper meaning through embodied methodologies, the notion of establishing intimacy (understood as connection) while not in the physical presence of others prompted our curiosity. How might we forge caring relationships and build connection, trust, and rapport through digitally mediated interviews on Zoom and similar platforms? While various researchers have explored the importance of digital technologies for maintaining and enabling connection, with the emergence of unique “digital intimacies” during the pandemic (Carayannis & Bolin, 2020; Herbert, 2020; Lupton, 2020), we are unaware of scholarship that considers how such technologies are affecting the emotional, embodied, and affective dimensions of pandemic research.

While care and relationships have long been central to feminist scholarship (Bashir, 2018; McClelland, 2017; Murphy, 2011; Toombs et al., 2017), during the pandemic, care was not limited to human relations and expressed only during research practices, rather it became an ongoing, layered, digital-material-affective experience influencing all aspects of the research process. Similar to Pink and colleagues (2017), we came to appreciate how the digital and the material in our research could be “understood as relational and emergent” (p. 371). Throughout our research in this changed environment, we were feeling intimacies differently (often through computer screens), and were recognizing how the sensitivity of relations forming through these vulnerable times required expressions of care that expanded beyond the confines of human in-person relations. Similar to Detamore’s (2016) queer(y)ing of ethics, we were interested as to the extent that our ethical considerations were entangled with our experiences of intimacy in this changed research environment. Taking inspiration from Braidotti’s description of relationality during the pandemic, we were prompted to consider how our experiences of care needed to change, responding to differently felt vulnerabilities and intimacies arising through the digital-material conditions of pandemic research.

Braidotti (2020) reimagines affirmative ethics in pandemic times and suggests that these drastically altered times can inspire us to develop “different ways of caring” (p. 2). Indeed, the digital environment, and lack of physical copresence, prompted us to develop digital intimacies and practices of care in “a more transversal, relational ethics that encompasses the non-humans” (Braidotti, 2020, p. 2). As feminist scholars who specialize in embodiment, physical distance was not only relevant but also essential to consider in our reimagining of care in digital research. Where previously we were able to rely on our ability to express care through bodily copresence, in online spaces, our corporeal responsiveness and embodied reflexivity could not be relied upon. The physicality of touch and body language (i.e., offering a cup of tea, touching a shoulder, holding the gaze, or leaning forward), that may previously have brought comfort, were no longer available. Downing et al. (2021) similarly found that therapists “holding space” (p. 1) for clients during digital sessions presented different challenges in online environments, thus requiring a broader range of strategies that incorporated both human and nonhuman relational considerations. In digital research space-time, any connection or resonance with human other(s) must be established and experienced through the medium of an internet connection, a camera, and screen. Such experiences prompted us to reflect on how technology was both enabling and constraining our ability to connect during pandemic research. Through the interviews and our ongoing digital research team meetings, we continued to ponder the possibilities for relational digital-material care practices.

Attending to care during conversations, we sought to attune our senses to aspects of this unique research environment that were influencing these digital connections. Durkin et al. (2021) wrote that “while our ability to touch is temporarily hindered during the pandemic, we must remain aware that other methods of communication need to be enhanced in an effort to compensate for its loss” (p. e4). In our pandemic research, we were attuning to possibilities for increased connection, or potentia (Braidotti, 2018), in digital spaces. Care during Zoom calls was a human/nonhuman entanglement where vocal tone relied on a microphone, body positioning and gesturing were experienced through screens, and eye contact was transmitted through (differently) sustained engagement with cameras on devices. With only our head and shoulders visible on the screen, any expression of care from our bodies was coming primarily from facial expressions and the eyes. At times, establishing digital intimacy demanded more effort than in-person engagements as the intensity of the gaze and bodily proximity to the camera were emphasized much more than would typically be socially acceptable in face-to-face interactions. Similar to findings from Downing et al. (2021) research with therapists, we noticed an increased attention to minute details, and felt the exhaustion that arose while maintaining a more focused presence online.

While we were considerate in the ways we could adjust our bodies, gaze, and vocal tone to encourage connection, there remained a disconnect between ourselves and our participants. As one woman remarked, “I think there’s something different about seeing pixels on a screen to seeing someone’s face up close.” Similar comments came from other women who commented that they wanted “to see people, face-to-face” and were tired of “being behind a computer all day.” Although connections were found in digital spaces, we, like the women in our study, noticed the ways technologically mediated interactions affected our embodied and affective relations with others. Various scholars have considered the potential of digital platforms for fostering a sense of intimacy online, including sustaining familial connections and fostering community through pandemic (e.g., Gallagher et al., 2020; Matthews et al., 2021; Thorpe et al., 2023; Watson et al., 2020). However, in our pandemic research, we also experienced the limitations of digitally mediated methods. Over time, we came to recognize that even our continual considered attempts to foster care online lacked the “sensuality of the flesh” and “exchange of warmth” (Braidotti, 2020, p. 2) that can bring comfort in a research environment, particularly important when discussing emotional and affecting topics such as life in pandemic. As one woman in our research commented, “you can just feel the energy when you are in the same room with somebody, that physical presence when you are next to somebody, rather than through a screen.” Feeling into the tensions, opportunities, and challenges of Zoom interviews prompted consideration of how such online methods were differently enabling connection and practices of care during times of social distancing.

Importantly, digital intimacies and multilayered practices of care did not stop at the end of Zoom calls. The affective responses to such research encounters ebbed, flowed, and shifted throughout the research process, lingering long after the final write-up. Such feelings of connection, empathy, sadness, grief, and worry encouraged our ongoing efforts toward cultivating various ways of caring for others during (and after) research with the women. For example, we continue to ensure the research is “beneficial” (Marino et al., 2020) for women. Drawing upon the findings, we are working with an array of health and sports organizations to advocate for more gender-responsive policies and supportive initiatives for women. There was (and continues to be) an explicit feminist politic to this research with the women’s time and experiences contributing to broader attempts toward advocacy in our sporting and academic networks.

Importantly, there is also an everyday feminist ethic of care in the small details of “doing” collaborative research during the pandemic. For example, our care for each other as participants and members of the research team continued in our email conversations and during our shared writing sessions online. In the absence of bodily presence, our online interactions within research teams took on different meanings. Kind language in emails, accommodating for different schedules and energy levels, and shared moments of excitement supporting each other on social media, all fostered continual connections of care beyond the research. As we found, fostering caring relational moments in pandemic research relies upon ongoing, digitally mediated encounters. Such an approach acknowledges that ethical practices expand beyond the immediate research environment, and are responsive to digital, material, affective, and continually emerging relational experiences during pandemic space-time.

Becoming Together-Apart

Similar to Averett’s (2021) pandemic research with parents, we recognized how increased vulnerability, sharing and listening to each others’ pandemic experiences, and bearing witness to each other’s struggles through these challenging times provided moments of comfort and support for both ourselves and our participants. In our research, women’s experiences of pandemic were not the same; however, there were commonalities across the participants, and between participants and researchers. Many of the women expressed gratitude for having the opportunity to discuss aspects of their pandemic life they had not previously shared, and there appeared to be something comforting, and even pleasurable, in these moments of sharing in the research context. Through the interview and research process, many of the women came to realize that some of their personal issues were not theirs alone, but shared with others, and there was an affective comfort in the togetherness established through such commonalities in crisis. Topics of precarious employment, the gendered distribution of labor, technological advances, natural disasters, social injustice and inequalities, environmental crisis, and the global health crisis of a pandemic were all pressing on the women’s minds and the ability to discuss concerns with other women similarly and differently affected offered relief.

Importantly, although we were able to establish commonality, we acknowledged that our experiences of pandemic were not the same. Moving through a global crisis as feminist posthuman scholars, our awareness of relational experiences of care is continually becoming, inclusive of human/nonhuman materiality, and uniquely felt. Understanding the complexity and range of issues faced by women (ourselves and others) becoming differently during a pandemic prompted us to consider Braidotti’s (2020) recommendation for thinking about both the potential for similarity and difference when experiencing a global crisis. This sensitivity to difference prompted further empathy and openness in our conversations with both the participants and our wider research team.

While the pandemic shifted everyone’s lived experiences, through our exchanges with the women in our research and within our research team, we came to appreciate how the changes and challenges women experienced had similarities, but were not the same. For some, the pandemic exacerbated economic inequalities and insecurities; for others, it brought awareness to the unhealthy relationships that were now contained in the home with no escape (Power, 2020; Thibaut, & van Wijngaarden-Cremers, 2020). Recognizing the vast differences in our pandemic experiences shifted the questions we were asking about relational experiences of care: How can we care for others? How can we care for ourselves? How can we care for those that do not have a voice (human and nonhuman)? Throughout our pandemic research experiences, connections with women participants and collaborations with other feminist scholars reminded us of the importance of choosing ethical actions based on an awareness that our becoming together-apart was not limited to our own individual experiences, but interwoven, with each action having the potential to influence our relational existence. As Braidotti (2020) suggests, pandemic times call for radically different understandings. We can no longer prioritize the human in an experience that is intricately interconnected (i.e., a global health crisis); instead, “we” must act collectively understanding that “we” are “not-one-and-the-same-but-are-in-this-convergence-together” (p. 7). Living through pandemic forced us to face common concerns and vast differences in our lived experiences and affective respondings. Interestingly, it was through witnessing our participants’ considered acts of care as respondings to pandemic inequalities that prompted us to consider how we, as feminist scholars, could adjust our practices of care in research settings.

Our interviews with women revealed the ways some were coming to rethink difference and inequality, and promoting small acts of care for their communities (Jeffrey et al., 2021). For example, one woman participant recalled, “we all might have different ways of dealing with it, or different strategies, or different challenges, but everyone is experiencing it.” Another described how her “awareness of different people’s home spaces” influenced the types of fitness classes she provided and the digital platforms she used. Each of these considerations demonstrated her efforts toward catering to the unique needs of her community. Recognizing the ways that these women were engaging in considerate acts of communal care prompted us to reflect on our own practices within the research community. We began considering how our everyday actions were influenced by an increased awareness of becoming together-apart, sharing pandemic experiences, but (often) alone on opposite sides of the screen, distanced by time and space, experiencing pandemic similarly but differentially. Durkin et al. (2021) wrote that, “while we know we are all in this together, we need to acknowledge that it can feel very painful and lonely being so far apart” (p. e4). Thus, being aware of our own separation and understanding the importance of connection as demonstrated by the women in our research, we recognized how we too were engaging in continual, often small, acts of care in relations with participants, coauthors, students, and the wider academic community. Like our women participants, we too recognized the ways that small acts of care/kindness had great significance during pandemic. Moments, that in prepandemic times, could have seemed insignificant (e.g., a short pre/post interview or team meeting chat), took on deeper meanings. The desire to connect, expressed through small acts of care, became important considerations in our research lives. Patience, humor, empathy, and kindness were appreciated more deeply, as they provided a reprieve from the fear, anxiety, and shared exhaustion entangled in pandemic life.

Conclusion: Toward Posthuman Ethics in (and Beyond) Pandemic Times

Becoming together while physically distanced has been discussed in relation to online communities supporting each other during pandemic, including feminist collaborative research (Jeffrey et al., 2021; Matthews et al., 2020; Watson et al., 2020). The shared intimacy of describing pandemic experiences in qualitative research has been shown to hold potential as a practice of care (Clavijo, 2020) with the distinctions of “vulnerability” becoming blurred during a global crisis affecting all relations. Our experiences in pandemic research revealed how digital, material, economic, social, biological, environmental, and affective aspects of our lives were all influencing our research practices and praxis as feminist scholars. Taking inspiration from Braidotti’s (2020) reimagining of affirmative ethics, we have come to understand that familiar prepandemic ethical research practices need to be continually reassessed in pandemic times. In this article, we shared our creative, embodied, and cognitive reflections on the re-turning of feminist relational ethics of care.

Where we recognize further potential to consider the potency of Braidotti’s (2020) concept of an affirmative ethical becoming is in the ways that we, as feminist scholars, can expand our understandings of relational ethical care beyond our research practices. This prompts us to consider how we might embody care as a value that informs all of our actions with human and nonhumans alike. The pandemic prompted a radically different research environment, and alongside the discomforts of living and researching during the crisis, we came to understand that becoming together-apart was not only a pandemic research sensibility but also an ontology that will guide our ethical considerations in future research, pedagogies, and politics. Expanding on Surmiak and colleagues’ (2022) suggestion that pandemic research can present both opportunity and threat to ethical conduct, and informed by Braidotti’s (2020) discussion of the posthuman convergence, we recognize that everything has changed, and continues to change. Thus, our understandings of and approaches to doing ethical relational research must continue to respond to these increasingly complex contemporary times.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Allison Jeffrey

Author Biographies

Allison Jeffrey is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Experiential Studies in Sport and Community at Cape Breton University. Her research engages theoretical frameworks and research processes that support continually expanding understandings of moving bodies in complex contemporary times.

Holly Thorpe is a Professor at the University of Waikato. Her research focuses on sport, physical culture and gender, and she continues to seek new innovations in social theory, qualitative methods, and representational styles to better understand the complexities of moving bodies and sporting cultures.

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