Researching (im)mobile lives during a lockdown: Reconceptualizing remote interviews as field events

Abstract

This article foregrounds the benefits and challenges of deploying remote interviews to investigate the digital practices of older adults from Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) backgrounds during a series of stay-at-home orders in in 2020 and 2021 in Victoria, Australia. By critically examining the employment of technologically mediated data collection (via video and phone call), we reconceptualize remote fieldwork as a collection of ethnographically significant field events. We draw on the socio material approach to map the impact of human–digital assemblage on the processes, possibilities and limits of collecting data remotely. The study reveals the ways participants' differing digital access, competencies, and social relations engender and undermine methodological interventions. Indeed, it offers a nuanced perspective on deploying remote fieldwork especially among older migrants in an increasingly digital world.