But where's the body? Bodies,time,money,and the political economy of post-pandemic field research

Abstract

Since the pandemic, field work has been transformed by shifts in the political economy affecting the material conditions underpinning research. In this research note, a research team considers their challenges and learning in completing field studies conducted in 2022, including intensified strains on time, money, researchers’ bodies, and risks associated with illness and infection spread. We argue that a neoliberal “research super-hero” norm operates within the research community, rooted in a conception of high productivity that mingles uneasily, for many researchers, with feminist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial social justice aims and responsibilities. Our 2022 fieldwork experience led us to notice how this norm has circulated within our explicitly feminist research team and nudged us to challenge it, while raising questions about how a “research-worker” norm can best be supported.

Prior to the global COVID-19 pandemic, our international research team was thoroughly socialized to what we now realize is a disembodied, super-hero researcher norm. We use the concept, “super-hero researcher,” lightheartedly to underscore the ways that many approaches to fieldwork draw on and reinforce unreachable standards in terms of tireless dedication to task completion regardless of the conditions of labor, and a relentless pursuit of a higher calling, in this case fearlessly rescuing the world from unsubstantiated conclusions and inaccurate knowledge. Our international research team often denied fatigue and the materiality of our bodies as we disembarked from long, often international air flights to hit the ground running for days and weeks of intensive ethnographic field work and research meetings. We deployed an ennobling masculinist norm that valorizes the mind-body split while denying or suppressing the needs of the physical body (Ellingson, 2017). It contains the assumption that, if organized properly and managed with sufficient control and skill, both the social world and research can be predictable, with researchers rapidly producing high quality and rigorous research results regardless of social conditions (Kelly and Gurr, 2019). This norm assumes that researchers can rely on others to manage their households, families, and other work responsibilities while doing fieldwork, so they can activate their full capacities as highly productive workers., reflecting the gender norms associated with hegemonic masculinity in which masculinized workers devote themselves to productive work, while feminized, subordinate others take care of social reproduction, including domestic labor (Braedley and Luxton, 2021; Messerschmidt, 2019).

This “masculinist” proposition is embedded in contemporary university research working conditions. As Connell (2010; 33) points out, there is “an embedded masculinity politics in the neo-liberal project” that denies the time, energy, and work involved in reproducing ourselves, our households, and our families daily and generationally, and university research regimes reflect these politics. This proposition mixed with our team's socialization to the values and ethical commitments embedded in our theoretical framework, feminist political economy. This framework pays attention to gendered work, includes care (or social reproduction) as labor, and advocates for a relational research approach that advances emancipatory aims (Armstrong and Armstrong, 2018; Braedley and Luxton, 2010). Together, these constraints and commitments combined to produce among our team a “super-hero researcher” norm, complete with solidaristic social justice sensibilities. Our team field work experiences in 2022 provided the impetus for a far-reaching reflection on these dynamics and our unintentional complicity in upholding them, despite our explicitly feminist research framework.

In 2022, we were thrilled, both individually and collectively, that international travel and fieldwork were once again permitted, and quickly dove back into team ethnography. But we were immediately confronted by factors that challenged our bodies, our methods, and our capacities to continually regroup, refocus, and “pivot” nimbly. We hit and had to scramble over unanticipated, unpredictable walls big and small, even though many on our team are experienced field researchers with at least a decade of international team ethnographies behind them. We know that ethnographic research demands flexibility in response to uncertainty, including the curiosity and stamina to deal with it. But our limited capacities and wrong-headed assumptions were exposed by shifting conditions. These included: the political economy of universities and research funding that structured our timing and finances; the social organization of labor markets and economies generating labor shortages; disrupted travel, union actions, and steeply rising and unpredictable costs; and differential vulnerabilities to the COVID virus among our research participants and our team.

We were also confronted by our thinning capacity to convince ourselves of our own invincibility as social justice-engaged researchers able to conquer the vulnerability of our bodies to exhaustion, COVID, our own aging, the routine demands of our households and families, and other assaults on our immutable wellbeing. We ask, why were we complacent about these factors prior to the pandemic, when they meant that we as researchers absorbed many costs of research? How could these conditions be different? Are there counter visions of field research that reflects the unpredictable post-pandemic world, and our susceptible bodies within it?

Much has been written about research during COVID, including ways to pursue research in online formats and other digital methods (Howlett, 2021; Kim et al., 2021; MacLean et al., 2020; Meskell et al., 2021). Considerable attention has also been paid to resilience in research (MacLean et al., 2020; Rahman et al., 2021), as well as practical and ethical considerations (Biswas, 2022; Braedley, 2018; MacLean et al., 2020; Surmiak et al., 2021), and reflexivity during crisis research (Rahman et al., 2021; Spence et al., 2016). Some authors have emphasized the importance of understanding that qualitative and critical approaches are embodied practices, as opposed to assuming a mind-body split in which the body is ignored or sublimated (Ellingson, 2017; Tantia, 2020; Thanem and Knights, 2019).

Many ethnographers have pointed out that field work is an embodied craft (Hickey and Smith, 2020) that means “the body—and mind—of the ethnographer are her main research tools” (Eggeling, 2022: 14). Given the wide-ranging impacts of COVID on bodies and health, these observations are particularly pertinent. Jenkins’ (2020) observation that “the ability to undertake fieldwork at all is also shaped by social relations that are often less recognised” (p. 2) speaks to the field work imperative for researchers to leap into data collection regardless of risks or challenges.

Our project

With the city as our unit of analysis, the focus of our international, comparative research project is first, to understand equity, aging, and care work in international contexts and second, to identify international promising practices and policies to support age-equity and age-inclusion. We use a feminist political economy lens to explore the interplay of political, economic, and social relations on organizations, individuals, policies, and practices that might otherwise appear neutral and objective, rather than as expressions of unequalt social power between dominant groups and those systemically subordinated (Mezzadri et al., 2022). The attention to governance and policy makes international comparative research an important methodological strategy to understand how different political choices work out in the everyday life of older people and care workers. We use ethnography to make visible the effects of these political choices. Feminist political economy is particularly useful in contexts such as services for older people, where most of the service providers, service users and volunteers are women, making the arena a highly feminized one that requires further theorization and explication (Braedley and Luxton, 2021; Klostermann et al., 2022). The goal of our project is to explicitly engage with and propose alternatives to inequities in the conditions of aging and caring among marginalized and oppressed groups.

Interweaving rapid team ethnography with feminist political economy provides our project with the possibility to be transformative and critical (Armstrong and Lowndes, 2018; Baines and Cunningham, 2013). ¹ We have been conducting international rapid team ethnographies in cities across Canada, and comparator cities in Europe, the antipodes and the Asia-Pacific region. Each ethnography lasts about 10 days and involves 12–20 researchers, with a small group from the “host” jurisdiction and the rest offering “fresh eyes” from a variety of countries, disciplines, and career stages. Once at a site, we fan out across pre-identified research sites in pairs or small groups, conducting interviews, observing, participating in community activities, chatting, taking photographs, and making field notes. Translators are sometimes involved. Team members meet regularly and typically eat an evening meal as a group, while simultaneously discussing and reviewing our field experiences to deepen and challenge our perspectives. We frequently audio record and/or write field notes in the evenings and on return flights. Our days are long and full, as we maximize these brief opportunities to collect data and make sense of what we are learning together. Funded in 2018 for a 7-year grant, our team had completed three of ten planned site studies prior to COVID restrictions in March 2020 and had planned and re-planned our next study sites as we tried to anticipate when field work would once again be possible.

Our project has an explicit aim to “change the conversation” in ways that address inequities in the conditions of aging and caring among marginalized and oppressed groups. We are conscious of our responsibilities to contribute to the public good with the public funding we have been granted. We are aware of our privilege and luck in receiving this funding, and the ecological costs we incur in doing research in this way. As a group of university faculty members, post-doctoral fellows, and doctoral students, our shared values and earnest commitments to emancipatory research keep us motivated and willing, including to “tough it out” and work long hours in fieldwork.

Hitting and scrambling over temporal, financial and ethical walls

When it became possible to return to field work in 2022, we jumped into high gear but soon discovered walls that, while not new, were more challenging in the pandemic-affected conditions. Among the many temporal factors confronting us, research funding realities include that funders, while somewhat flexible, provide clear start and end dates for project funding. With only three studies completed prior to COVID lockdowns and travel restrictions, our team was behind by two years and four fieldwork studies. Although provided with an extension, we were anxious about completing our plan of work. Our team members’ individual research programs, schedules, workplace and personal commitments include many other projects and timelines.

For example, doctoral students need to complete their programs, post-docs are funded for limited periods, and faculty researchers juggle many projects and commitments. Personal life always continues, and, in our team, babies had been born, divorces had occurred, and elderly parents required more care. Some team members were making retirement plans that may not include continuing field work. Some members were depleted from a variety of stressors and were reconsidering field work. In addition, since the pandemic began, everyone on our team had been recalibrating their research schedules due to delays, health, and shifts in their circumstances. Did we have the capacity to maintain our highly expert and carefully composed team? Would those who committed to setting up site studies remain willing and available? With some trepidation, we decided to prepare and complete two site studies in 2022, one in Canada and one in Europe, hoping to regain momentum and renew collaborations.

As soon as we began to assemble for our first site study, temporal and financial walls sprung up. Our funding is received by and managed by one university that in turn interprets the rules of the funder and provides parameters about how we spend funds and account for our expenditures. Our first challenge was the university level policy that permits researchers one day of rest after international travel only in cases where their travel period is over 20 hours of continuous travel, with permission sought in advance and awarded on a case-by-case basis. This policy assumes we fit the model of indefatigable, self-sustaining super-hero-researchers, able to immediately enter the field with clear minds, high energy levels, and uninterrupted focus upon arrival. In pre-COVID times, we often arrived at study sites somewhat physically depleted and relied on excitement and commitment to carry us through.

In June 2022, this was much more difficult to generate, due to changing conditions. First, there were seemingly endless delays at airports. Some researchers spent long, unscheduled, sleepless overnights in uncleaned airports short on staff and services, unable even to buy food and beverages. On this and our subsequent field study, we encountered canceled flights, rescheduled flights, lost luggage, and massive difficulties in booking alternative flights and accommodations. Some researchers ran into disruptions related to labor unrest and strike action as tired and overworked airline, airport, and hospitality staff tried to recoup some of the losses experienced during the pandemic. The local organizing teams for these studies reported new roadblocks and challenges in organizing the sites visits, leaving them feeling over-extended even before the study started. Though these are not unexpected elements of crisis in a capitalist economy reeling from a global pandemic, nevertheless these dynamics meant that our research team was hitting and scaling walls even before hitting the ground.

The result was that we could not get our bodies or our minds to the study sites in a timely manner, and some arrived exhausted, hungry, and sometimes without a change of clothes. We were reminded keenly of the limits of our bodies and their centrality in undertaking field work.

Ethical walls arose next. In our first post-COVID site study, after three glorious days interacting face-to-face with research participants, one team member tested positive for COVID-19. Anticipating both the new ethnographic environment and conscious of our elderly research participants’ particular vulnerabilities, our coordinating group had carefully developed a COVID protocol. It had been circulated to all our researchers and sites in advance, ensuring appropriate masking, vaccinations, and other precautions that exceeded public health guidelines. However, when faced with the reality of an infected team member, our concern that we may have spread the virus to participants and each other lent an urgency to our deliberations on how to proceed. We met both as a team and among the leadership to generate ethical research strategies (Braedley, 2018). We ran to get sufficient rapid tests to ensure all of us were testing daily.

Agonizing about the burden we were placing on participants, we contacted the research sites and our scheduled participants, asking if we could move to online and phone interviews and meetings. Very familiar with Zoom due to the pandemic conditions, these sites, groups, and individuals surprised us by moving confidently online, allowing us to meet in groups, as individuals and as part of meetings and discussions. As one of our site contacts emailed us:

“Thanks for letting us know. . . We would ask a program participant not to come if they were exposed, and our staff would do the same. I’m so sorry! I hope we can help in other ways. I have a few contacts for you, from seniors expressing interest in one-on-one interviews, over the phone. Talk soon.

Ironically after flying across numerous time zones at considerable expense and with significant exhaustion, our data collection continued from our individual, small hotel rooms where we worked together alone, peering at participants and research sites though the same laptop screens we had been using for the past two years. Our research sites and participants worked overtime to help us do so, doing extra work just as they have done so many times during the pandemic. Some team members noted that, though feeling exhausted and knowing that taking a break was totally acceptable, we took on a masculinist approach to everyday research by underestimating or neglecting the care needs of the body. We kept pushing ourselves to undertake additional interviews, to follow up on every lead, and to leave no stone unturned that might generate credible data.

When a second team member tested positive, we worried that we were the super-spreader research team. Questions emerged about whether and how to meet and mask, how to isolate and care for those testing positive, how to cope with being ill in unfamiliar circumstances, and how we would deal with more illness, possible related travel delays, and safe travel home for everyone. In the background, time and money concerns churned. Every delay and change entailed an expense, and we were increasingly reminded that the costs of travel, food, and lodging were rising steeply and might continue to do so, potentially playing havoc with our research financial planning. Further, our team leaders worried that if these 2022 field visits proved unsuccessful, our team might never recover lost ground and morale.

We also noted the effects of Zoom in other ways. In the past, travel meant being unavailable for other work at our universities and commitments. With online meetings becoming ubiquitous, many of us experienced considerable pressure to participate in events and meetings at our home universities while doing field work. Some of us presented at conferences, administrated programs, attended faculty meetings and more while doing site studies. For many of us, this meant performing across international time zones, further intensifying our working days and nights.

Despite these walls springing up around us, we quietly noticed something else. Although frequently exhausted, rumpled, and ungainly, our team solved problems collaboratively and without much fuss, meeting when we could, talking by phone, Zoom, and texting when we could not. We supported each other (see Rahman et al., 2021), finding unlikely toeholds in the walls blocking our progress. Rather than tireless super-hero-researchers conquering every challenge, we were embodied, worried, nerdy, sometimes ill, and vulnerable researchers collectively inching our ways over unexpected and unanticipated barriers in our paths. Consistent with other team research experiences, in many ways our team became closer and stronger (Meskell et al., 2021; Rahman et al., 2021). We laughed, learned, and leaned into each other in new ways. We developed stronger intellectual and personal relationships within the group while having conversations that stimulated new insights into thinking about the world and our work in it. We did not need to be super-heroes to develop our analysis. We were also able to lean into one another for support because our feminist way of working had valued relationships and cultivated them, so there was relational strength and relational slack when it was needed.

We became increasingly aware of the benefits of our feminist political economy grounding. This approach requires not only extensive statistical, policy, and practice mapping that prepare us before moving into ethnographic field work, but a relational approach in working with communities and organizations. To that end, our site planning teams had spent over six months meeting via Zoom with community members, policy makers, advocates, and service providers. These team members had developed a foundation of research relationships that, when challenges hit, gave us a springboard over some of the research walls that emerged. While our data collection in this study was less extensive in some ways than fieldwork we have done in other sites, the breadth and depth of the data, and the relationships we developed, were at least as extensive.

In confronting and scrambling over these walls together, we also saw more clearly that the political economy of research regimes pivots on notions of a pre-pandemic world (Stilwell, 2019), which even then worked best if one were able to adopt a body-denying, masculinist super-hero-researcher approach, encouraged by neoliberal university working conditions and facilitated by technology. These research regimes rest on assumptions of a stable and understandable world; of strong, tireless, flexible researcher bodies and minds impervious to illness, infection, and anxiety; predictable, safe travel; content and compliant labor forces in all services and organizations; and data collection that proceeds relatively smoothly and without undue wrinkles, ethical dilemmas, or the need to urgently change approaches mid-stream. Some of these normative assumptions are built on a positive, quantitative approach to research with researchers crunching data, exerting control through numeric manipulations, and generating “results” regardless of the changing social context in which our bodies live and work. However, in qualitative research that engages with the messiness and stress of the social world in post-pandemic conditions, these assumptions are increasingly nonsensical.

Our highest wall, perhaps, was our reliance on our team's emancipatory commitments to fuel our work in the face of fatigue and complications. We are committed to solidarity with the many older people and care workers whose lives have been hard hit by the pandemic and the relentless assault of political, economic, and social inequities and oppression. We are aware of our responsibilities and accountabilities, not only to our universities and funders, but to the Canadian public. Further, as a team of mostly women and a few men, including queer, straight, racialized, white, and Indigenous researchers, older and younger researchers at different career stages, and a number for whom English is not our first language, we are embedded in households and communities in different countries, with multiple responsibilities and loyalties beyond our work. Many of us have researched and written about the contradictions affecting care workers in their paid and unpaid work including job strain related to conflicts shaped by neoliberalism, gender norms, and solidarity claims (Baines and Daly, 2021; Baines, 2020; Braedley et al., 2018).In our own jobs, we had focused on our privilege and good fortune, suppressing concerns that our super-hero research approach was not only eroding our well-being but was in conflict with the values and chief insights of our theory. We are coming to terms with our embodied and material limits and reformulating how we do this solidarity in the years ahead, without depleting our limited resources.

We continue to question what all this means for research processes and findings. What does it mean to reject the super-hero-researcher model, and embrace the materiality of ourselves as embodied worker-researchers? Though some granting bodies have provided 1- to 2-year extensions to research grants, the basic assumptions about research, structured by the political economy of universities and research grant regimes, remain unchanged even as challenges in field work conditions have intensified. Though our team can and did find hand holds and foot holds in the walls obstructing our research, we and our research sites absorbed the jeopardy and costs of making research “work” in the post-pandemic context. Ongoing flexibility, intensive work, and necessary changes to methods and approaches happened despite inflexible rules and a lack of recognition of the real costs of research to researchers and research sites grappling with the lingering impacts of the pandemic. We also wonder how we may have played into constantly reconstituting a masculinist group culture and “group think” through our ongoing team building in the sharing of findings, reflections, and meals at the end of most days. How do we ensure that coming together stimulates and nurtures our work and relationships, and undoes, rather than reinforces, the research super-hero mentality that lurks in academia's competitive culture?

We see an important opportunity for reflexivity and far-reaching policy and practice change for research funders, universities, and researchers. Preliminary lessons learned include our recognition that we are embodied researchers who in the post-COVID shortages and labor disruptions encounter challenges even getting our bodies to the study sites. We are also sorting out how to stop infinitely accommodating to research regime conditions and to find ways to do high quality, timely research in solidarity with those with whom we conduct our research, while also surfacing, confronting, and resisting conditions that ignore our materiality.

This insight overlaps with other lessons about time and money. We lose critical research time when we spend hours or days in airports instead of on the ground collecting data. We lose time when we arrive exhausted and more likely to get ill. We also lose time when we test positive for COVID and need to isolate, as we are told we will do for years to come.¹ We need time to rest when we arrive at study sites exhausted and depleted (and sometimes without our equipment or luggage). We are now making more time to meet as research teams to regroup and make new plans in the face of missing, late, and ill colleagues. We are allowing more time to renegotiate with study sites and participants in light of emerging challenges. We are sorting out what nimble pivoting means to the quality and quantity of our data in the context of rapidly changing social, economic, and research-specific conditions. All these temporal elements have a financial aspect. In concrete terms, we need research granting organizations and universities to recognize our battle with the clock and reconsider rigid funding rules that do not respond to research conditions. We need uncomplicated pathways to extensions, support for research reconfigurations, and increased funding to cover unanticipated costs and delays.

As we work to dismantle rather than reinforce the research super-hero mentality within our team culture, it becomes essential to be aware of what our methods convey to students, administrative support workers, and emerging researchers. We need to promote an environment where intellectual and relational growth challenges the gendered norms prevalent in academic competitiveness, values collective well-being, and promotes equitable participation.

Beyond these immediate lessons, we wonder how to use our collective experience of scrambling over field research walls to plan and organize our team ethnographies differently. Given the continual uncertainties we invite by doing field research, what might research look like with an embodied research-worker norm, rather than research-super-hero one? As we plan for future years, we see this as one more wall to scale.