Virtual Qualitative Research Using Transnational Feminist Queer Methodology: The Challenges and Opportunities of Zoom-Based Research During Moments of Crisis

Abstract

In this paper, we discussed our experiences with Zoom-based virtual qualitative research with Asian international students attending Canadian universities. When reflecting on our study, we drew inspiration from Roberts et al., (2020) who highlight the ethical challenges that emerge when conducting virtual qualitative research with a community that is experiencing the harrowing effects of COVID-19 in real time. Yet we also departed from such work by considering the added ethical complexity of conducting research during COVID-19 with research participants and with research team members who have transnational lives. In answering the question, “how do you design a virtual qualitative research project with research participants and with a research team whose lives are transnational,” we discussed how our use of transnational feminist queer methodology allows us to emphasize accountability and flexibility and recognize the multiple-and-varied social locations of our research participants and our research team members. We realized that working with research participants who have transnational lives means that notions of risk and consent cannot only be considered from the standpoint of the individual who is participating in the project. Instead, it is paramount that risk and consent be considered from the standpoint of the individual’s larger, transnational community and location in global, geopolitical contexts. Transnational feminist queer methodology also allowed us to see the challenges and possibilities of virtual qualitative research. While Zoom presented challenges (namely, that our participants were concerned about their privacy), we found the functionalities of Zoom to enhance our research. Specifically, we found that the chatbox deepened participant engagement through the sharing of memes and GIFs, allowing more rapport to develop. Ultimately, we argue that virtual qualitative research is not an inferior alternative to in-person research but should instead be seen as a different way of doing research, one necessitating distinct methodologies and methods.

Introduction

In March 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic reached Canada, we witnessed in real time the emergence and amplification of anti-Chinese and anti-Asian rhetoric in the country and in North America. As scholars and members of the Asian diaspora in Canada, we were unsurprised by the emergence of anti-Asian racism in such a time of crisis, which we saw as being part of the long, fraught history of Asian migrants being deemed as outsiders and threats to the Canadian nation-state. Having lived through SARS, we were additionally well aware of how Asian communities were scapegoated for SARS in North America (Leung, 2008). We saw the anti-Asian rhetoric as in keeping with long histories of characterizations of Asians in North America as “contagions” (Shah, 2001). As the pandemic continued, anti-Asian rhetoric gave way to targeted physical violence and slurs against diasporic Asian communities, with women and older people bearing the disproportionate brunt of this violence (Chau, 2021).

In COVID-19 times, the globally mobile Asian body has come to be conflated with the global mobility of the virus itself. Not surprisingly, policy responses to the pandemic have targeted mobility itself in attempts to stave off the spread of the virus. Key among these responses is the adoption of border, migration, and travel controls as national public health responses to the pandemic. In Canada, as in other countries, geographical discourses of the virus’ origins as being from or rampant in some world regions came to inform whose mobilities came to be restricted more than others. These mobility restrictions have been framed not necessarily in explicitly racialized terms, but in terms of “objective” data such as infection rates or patterns of spread. While it is well beyond the scope of this paper to analyze the racial politics of such geographic restrictions, the uses of border, migration, and travel controls do nevertheless harken back to a longer racial history in which controls targeting Asians’ migration and mobility in the North American context were justified at least partly using the language of public health and the greater good (Mawani, 2003; Shah, 2001). Both these policy restrictions and the potent geopolitical language of “China virus” have important material consequences, bearing upon, for example, travelers of Asian descent whose experience of anti-Asian racism were specifically tied to perceptions of their bodily mobility being synonymous with the global spread of COVID-19 (Diroy, 2020; Xie, 2021).

As university-based academics, we know that post-secondary institutions and academia are not immune from anti-Asian racism. Indeed, we were graduate students at the University of Toronto when the infamous “Too Asian” news article was published in Macleans Magazine in 2010 (Findlay and Kohler, 2010). In the article, the designation “too Asian” was used to describe the University of British Columbia, University of Toronto and other Canadian universities whose student bodies was perceived by interviewed white students to be too academically focused, competitive and inaccessible. Rather than being a mere descriptor of university demographics, “too Asian” came to describe unfriendly and “no fun” campus lives, student experiences and academic programs. Quite importantly, Asians in Canadian universities—no matter whether international or domestic students—came to be blamed for shifting Canadian universities away from white students’ expectations of the proper or ideal university experience.

Given this three-part context—of the rise of anti-Asianness during the pandemic, the regulation of borders as a public health measure, and the precarious positioning of Asians in Canadian universities—we began to worry about the specific impacts of COVID-19 on students of Asian descent in Canadian universities. We decided to design a virtual qualitative research study examining the experiences of Asian international students at York University in Toronto and at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where Tungohan and Catungal worked, respectively. We wanted to surface how Asian descent students in our universities have been experiencing the pandemic and how they are navigating and making sense of their experiences. Among other project goals, we wanted to make sure that the specificity of their experiences as racialized students do not get buried under more general, de-raced conversations about student life in pandemic times.

We began our research project fully expecting that the usual in-person qualitative methods and approaches that we have experience with needed to be rethought and reworked in response to the pandemic context. While we both have used principles of interpretivist methodology in our prior work and have engaged in practices of “relational interviewing,” where “learning through missteps” (Fujii, 2018: 5) and “active reflexivity” (Soedirgo and Glass, 2020) are expected, the evolving situation of the pandemic meant that we had to be particularly agile in responding to issues that suddenly and unexpectedly emerged. As Pocock et al. (2021) note, “COVID-19 presents unique challenges to the design and conduct of qualitative health research” (2403). Public health regulations, such as social distancing mandates, restrict researchers’ capacity to conduct face-to-face qualitative research, including in-person interviews, ethnographic observation, and focus groups (Lobe et al., 2020). In addition, as Santana et al. (2021) astutely point out, researchers “are not exempt from the psychological toll of the pandemic or the secondary stressors that may compound personal and professional trauma” (1064). We thus also had to account for pandemic-related stresses, including not only the challenges facing international students, but also the professional and personal demands that we, as researchers, faced. The latter included navigating institutional ethics systems [research ethics boards (REBs)] that were themselves also negotiating the unfamiliar research environment of a global pandemic and how it challenges usual protocols for ethical research. In addition, we, along with members of our research team (including three Research Assistants), faced personal challenges during the pandemic. We also had to modify parts of our project in response to the very real concerns expressed by our participants regarding the virtual nature of our study.

This paper offers critical reflections on our experiences with adopting virtual qualitative methods during pandemic times. We draw on and extend Roberts, Pavlakis and Richards’ (2021) reflections on their experiences conducting a virtual qualitative research project with respondents who were experiencing the effects of COVID-19 while the study was taking place. In their article, they astutely point out that the practice of virtual qualitative research produces challenges and considerations across the research life cycle that add to or depart from those encountered in in-person research, a point echoed by Lobe et al. (2021) and Pocock et al. (2021). One of the issues identified by these scholars concerns the opportunities and challenges posed by the use of technology in virtual research, particularly in terms of ethics and equity considerations. Roberts et al. (2021) note, for example: “ensuring that virtual qualitative research is conducted ethically may require attention to different issues and some best practices from in-person research may not transfer” (3). For example, virtual research methods enabled them to conduct work while minimizing COVID-19 risks, both to themselves and to their participants. Others have also pointed out that virtual research could also require the adoption of new research practices in order to navigate the specific technological challenges of virtual methods, including, for example, using online modes for acquiring consent (Lobe et al., 2020) and identifying best practices for participants to use to increase anonymity in online research environments, such as the use of virtual or blurred backgrounds on participants’ video feeds (ibid; Pocock et al., 2021).

Because Roberts, Pavlakis and Richards’s (2021) research is specifically rooted in Houston and they frame their work in very local ways, their reflections do not adequately examine how transnational and geopolitical processes and globally situated researchers and participants bear upon the ethics and politics of virtual research methods. With COVID-19 being an intensely global and geopolitical phenomenon (Catungal & Tungohan, 2021), how the “global” manifests as an issue in virtual research could use more careful methodological attention. In particular, as our research concerns the impacts of COVID-19 on a specific migrant population, we argue that research must attend to the politics of globality, migrancy and transnationalism in relation to the ethics and practice of virtual research methods.

Our paper thus departs, in one significant way, from Roberts et al. (2021) by discussing the ramifications of virtual qualitative research when conducted with research participants who have “everyday transnational lives” (Collins, 2003; Kwak, et al., 2019). The question animating this piece is as follows: “What are the ethical, practical and political challenges of doing virtual qualitative research with research participants and with a research team whose lives are transnational?” In answer to this question, we take inspiration from Browne et al.’s (2017) discussion of “transnational feminist queer methodologies” and address how using this approach allows us to emphasize accountability and flexibility; recognize the multiple-and-varied social locations of our research participants and our research team members; and, finally, see the challenges and possibilities of our research (Browne, et al., 2017; see also MacDonald, 2019). Using this approach enables us not to succumb to methodological nationalism, that is, the tendency of social science research to uncritically accept the primacy of the nation-state in explaining social trends (Wimmer and Glick Schiller, 2003). It also allows us to emplace methodological technologies, such as Zoom, in the “global intimate” context of our participants’ transnational lives. Doing so enables us to recognize that technologies and techniques of data collection are lived, embodied and situated.

In what follows, we reflect on our experience with conducting virtual research during the pandemic as Asian Canadian scholars with fellow migrant research participants. It is our hope that our reflections offer lessons for researchers who conduct or are thinking about conducting virtual qualitative research. After contextualizing our research and providing more background information on our project, we highlight methodological lessons that we learned from our experience, focusing on three themes: (i) virtual research platforms (e.g., Zoom) as political technologies, (ii) flexibility and care as ethical commitments, and (iii) transnational and geopolitical issues as methodological concerns. Our discussion of these themes is informed by and extends the insights from transnational feminist queer methodology (Browne et al., 2017), an approach that we value for its commitments to politically, ethically and socially engaged research drawing from feminist and queer perspectives. We conclude by pointing to some “take-away” lessons for fellow qualitative research scholars on the ethical and methodological complications, as well as possibilities, of virtual research approaches.

Research Context

When discussing virtual qualitative research with transnational migrants, we do so specifically in the larger context of our research study examining the experiences of Asian international students who are attending our respective universities. We both live in two of Canada’s largest cities, both of which have a significant Asian population. Our respective universities also have a sizable Asian international student population. In 2018, York University had 8823 international students (Williams, et al., 2020), with China and Hong Kong counting as its top-source countries (York International, 2018). The University of British Columbia in 2018 had 15, 460 international students, with 37% of its international students coming from Mainland China (N = 5719), with China being its top-source country (Mukherjee-Reed & Szeri, 2019: 33). Media reports within these two cities have highlighted increased instances of anti-Asian discrimination during the COVID-19 pandemic in these cities, despite being major urban centers with a significant Asian presence (see, among many examples, Perkel, 2021; Lavoie, 2021; Chan, 2021). An online news site even named Vancouver as the “Anti-Asian Hate Crime Capital in North America” (Obiko Pearson, 2021). University students of Asian descent, as well as workers of Asian descent who work in universities, have been some of the documented victims of targeted anti-Asian violence, both in our university contexts and elsewhere (Ke, 2021; Perkel, 2021; Hong & Alden, 2021; Davlos, 2020).

International students from Asia constitute a subset of the Asian diaspora in Canada. These students study and live in national and local contexts with widely documented histories of interpersonal and structural forms of anti-Asian violence (see various chapters in Coloma and Pon, 2017). These racisms are not of the past, but continue these days, resurfacing significantly in the wake of crises, such as COVID-19. We have noted in previous work, and we discuss further below, that these racisms have specific impacts on Asian international students, given their legal status in Canada and their transnational location (Catungal & Tungohan, 2021). For instance, during the pandemic, Asian international students faced additional pressures because they are more likely to be living apart from their families and other sources of support. They also have to contend with the possibility of prolonged border closures, keeping them apart from their transnational support systems for an indefinite period of time.

In Canada, as elsewhere, Asian international students are caught up in a context of paradoxical societal discourses about their place in Canada and its universities. On the one hand, they (and the revenue that they bring) are welcomed and even sought after within post-secondary institutions as part of the Canadian government’s drive to “internationalize” universities (Kim & Sondhi, 2019).On the other hand, they are vilified for their increasing presence in universities, as seen, for example, through mainstream magazine articles asking whether certain universities in Canada have become “too Asian” (read: too competitive, too expensive, no fun) (Mahtani, 2010; Coloma, 2013). Consequently, we believed that examining Asian international students’ experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic was both urgent and timely, not least because the pandemic forces us to ask questions about societal and institutional responsibilities to Asian international students especially in a time of elevated anti-Asian racism.

Qualitative Research during the COVID-19 Pandemic Using a Transnational Feminist Queer Methodology

Before the pandemic, articles that focus on the use of video and audio technologies (otherwise known as voice-over internet protocol or VOIP) in research were becoming commonplace. While many such articles highlighted the benefits and challenges of using certain platforms such as Zoom (Archibald, et al., 2019), Skype (Lo Iacano et al., 2016), and FaceTime (Weller, 2017), the “gold standard for qualitative research” remained in-person interviews because of the context clues (e.g., body language) that researchers can get from face-to-face interactions (Weller, 2017: 613). Yet, as Santana et al. (2021) point out, in-person forms of data collection became untenable during the pandemic, not only due to institutional, policy and legal restrictions on in-person activity, but also due to ethical issues related to risk and safety of both researchers and participants. Researchers have tried to respond by adapting their research studies to account for COVID-19 and accompanying challenges and restrictions (Roberts et al., 2021; Lobe et al., 2020) or by trying to produce “just-in-time” research that can influence policies formed during the health crisis (Jairath, et al., 2021). Some, including the authors of this piece, saw VOIP as the only logical way—and the most ethical one—to conduct research.

When reflecting on the process we used to design our study, we noticed similarities between our project and Roberts et al. (2021). Roberts et al. (2021) shared the issues that they faced when conducting virtual research with homeless students in Houston, Texas. We agree with their observations that “we could not simply replicate in-person interviews with virtual technology” (Roberts, et al., 2021: 6), that virtual technologies increased workloads (Roberts et al., 2021), and that having a second researcher be present during each interview session was beneficial (ibid.). Like Roberts et al. (2021), we realized that it took more work to establish trust and rapport via Zoom because established ways of doing so, such as meeting for coffee, sharing food or having the benefit of being able to read people’s body language, were unavailable. The additional workload was also the reason for why we opted whenever possible to have a second researcher be present during our interviews to trouble-shoot technological problems, to keep tabs on the Zoom chatbox, or to send private messages to the researcher conducting the interview to keep us on time.

Along with their discussion of the technical aspects of virtual research, Roberts et al.’s (2021) reflections on the ethics of conducting virtual research with a marginalized community resonated with us deeply. Like them, we shared a deep adherence to “ethical and equitable research” practices, particularly as it pertains to the consent process, “access to participants,” and “risk” (Roberts, et al., 2021: 8–9). In fact, our understanding of research ethics extends far beyond what our universities’ respective Research Ethics Boards require us to do. We saw this project not only contributing to academic theorizing on the Asian diaspora in Canada but also informing policies that might lead to a deeper understanding of Asian community members’ everyday lived realities during COVID-19 times (see Pacheco-Vega & Parizeau, 2018 on how scholars use their work to extend academic theorizing and discuss the applications of their work in the real world through “doubly-engaged” social science research). In addition, as professors of Asian descent, we were intimately familiar with the stresses that COVID-19 brought to Asian students and wanted this project to provide a cathartic space for them. In this sense, we viewed research as a political practice that can affirm marginalized people’s experiences of social injustice in real time. At the same time, we were invested in the idea of how our research project can unearth the lived contradictions of in-between-ness that define the lives of many transnational migrants. This meant that we wanted to be attentive and responsive to ethical issues that emerge for students with transnational lives.

To navigate these challenges, as transnational feminist researchers, we decided to place at the center our underlying ethical commitments to flexibility, to accountability, and to celebrating complexity. As Browne et al. (2017) discuss, an awareness of the “transnational” allows researchers to be attentive to “the differential effects of scattered colonialisms, neoliberalism, and homonationalisms” (1378), which for our project helped us contextualize our respondents’ lived experiences amid the intersecting structural forces of, for example, neoliberalism and colonialism that are ever-present realities, including in Canadian universities. This means, for example, understanding that narratives of individual choice cannot solely account for students’ decisions. That is, students’ decision to get degrees abroad despite the financial costs of doing so and their experiences of financial stress due to ever-increasing international student tuition fees can be better contextualized by using a transnational lens. Such a transnational approach acknowledges structural inequities wrought by colonial ideologies that see degrees abroad as having more value than degrees in local universities in the first instance and by the financial pressures facing universities due in part to declining public funds in the second instance. At the same time, our commitment to feminist research means that we continually practice self-reflexivity in order not only to unearth uneven power dynamics during the research process, but also to recognize that participation in research, for all involved, is an embodied and felt experience that is shaped by people’s positionalities. Our attentiveness to power means that we not only unpack the power dynamics between ourselves and our research participants but also that we interrogate hierarchies resulting from geopolitics (Browne, et al., 2017: 1380). And finally, our commitment to queer research praxis led us to continually interrogate the normative and the hegemonic. It has led us to celebrate the complexity of our research process and even to excavate moments of creativity through virtual qualitative research.

As we discuss below, our use of transnational feminist queer methodology gave us the tools to navigate various ethical issues emerging from virtual research, the ongoing and evolving realities of COVID-19, and the transnational nature of our research team and research participants’ lives (including geopolitical realities). It additionally provided us with a lens through which we could celebrate the creative possibilities engendered by our use of Zoom, allowing us to see technology not only as a tool for research but as an embedded part of people’s everyday transnational lives, affecting the way they relate to each other and to the world. Finally, the use of this methodology gave us a useful framework to interpret our data.

We discuss each of these below

Ethical implications of navigating virtual research platforms as political technologies

The use of virtual platforms such as Zoom became commonplace in academic institutions during the pandemic. Our experience with using these platforms for our research made it clear to us that we need to consider seriously the various ways that institutional and political systems define not only their utility, but also their legality and riskiness for research purposes. Simply put, as researchers, we need to attend to virtual platforms as political technologies: that these platforms are situated in regulatory and geopolitical contexts shapes not only whether and how we can use them for research, but also what ethical implications for their use might emerge for us as researchers and for our research participants.

One of the most potent ways that virtual research platforms came to be evident to us as political technologies is through concerns over privacy that were articulated by both our institutions and our participants. Concerns over privacy illuminate the political situatedness of virtual research platforms in two slightly different ways: for our institutions, privacy concerns emerge as a result of legal regulations on data storage, while for our participants, these concerns were about their fears of surveillance and for their safety.

In Canada, researchers in public universities are required, by law, to ensure that any data related to research must be stored in Canadian servers. Our initial research plan was to use Zoom for our research, but the REB at University B pointed out to us that Zoom cannot be used for research because, at the start of our project, it used US servers to store data. We thus opted to use Skype to conduct our virtual focus groups. However, the very terrain of technological compliance with regulations shifted during COVID-19. As we were going through the ethics process, Zoom had become compliant with Canadian regulations on data storage. This, along with Zoom becoming the “go-to” platform for academic activities during COVID-19 times, made us decide to shift away from Skype to Zoom as our virtual research platform. For similar reasons, the REB asked us to shift away from Dropbox to Sync as the cloud storage platform for our research documents. This required amendments to our ethics protocol that we had not anticipated having to make.

The legal regulation of virtual research is thus a terrain that requires attention and consideration particularly in the early stages of research methods conceptualization and design. We echo Pocock et al. (2021) in pointing to how legal and institutional regulatory terrains bear upon the conduct of research, including the very practical question of which virtual platforms are available and compliant for the purposes of virtual research.

Along with concerns about the research platform itself, our REB experience also taught us about our institutions’ concerns over participants’ uses of Zoom as a research platform. As with the regulatory concern noted above, privacy was also the frame used by our REBs to communicate this concern, and they pointed to built-in platform functionalities as tools for ensuring privacy. We were asked by one of our institutional REBs to create a “best practices” document for our participants, with pointers on how to safeguard their own privacy and with reassurances of how we, as researchers, were doing the same. Of the former, pointers included reminding participants that they can choose to opt for pseudonyms on their video displays or to turn off audio and video as they saw fit. Of the latter, we told participants that we disabled participants’ capacity to share screen (in order to prevent Zoom bombing) or to use in-program recording capacities. These practices are specific to virtual research using online platforms. In in-person research, control of research technologies such as audio recorders typically fall solely on the researchers. With the use of online platforms like Zoom, consideration of platform functionalities on the part of participants also come to be part of the question of ethics and privacy in research.

After receiving REB clearance from both of our institutions and during the course of recruitment, we realized that concerns over privacy and its relationship to virtual research were also shared by potential research participants. Unlike our institutions, however, potential participants were concerned less about legal restrictions on data storage, and more so about being surveilled as transnational subjects. This made clear to us that the ethical implications of virtual research platform use are also shaped by the very positioning of our participants as globally mobile subjects with relationships to multiple nation-states.

Early in our research, despite receiving numerous emails from prospective research participants responding to our recruitment calls on social media, we noticed that most of them opted not to participate in our study. We later learned from our RAs that much of the concern pertained to the virtual nature of our research, and more specifically whether recordings made through Zoom were truly private. Simply put, some of our students were from countries with authoritarian regimes that kept tabs on the behavior of nationals abroad. They were afraid that participating in our project placed them at risk. We discuss the geopolitics of virtual surveillance in greater detail below. For now, what we want to focus our discussion on is the very question of how to proceed ethically in the face of participants’ real concerns over surveillance, privacy and safety. We do so to pinpoint that, as researchers, dealing with ethical concerns over participants’ privacy and safety during virtual research requires crafting relations prior to the event of platform-based data collection itself. Taking to heart participants’ concerns, we decided that the most ethical way to proceed with participant recruitment was to shift our approach. If students were feeling unsafe proceeding with the project because they were unfamiliar with us and also were dubious over Zoom’s privacy features, it seemed unethical to proceed with trying to recruit students in this manner. We briefly contemplated sending repeat follow-up emails to students who initially contacted us in an attempt to get them to consent to participate in our project. We ultimately decided that doing so was coercive and thus unethical. Even if the ideal scenario for most qualitative research projects was to recruit participants who researchers did not know to ensure that researchers could not influence participant responses, we were ultimately concerned with ensuring that students felt comfortable with our project and trustful of us as a research team. In the end, we decided to recruit students who either knew us or our RAs and could trust that we would protect their interests. We were careful not to recruit students over whom we had a direct power relationship (e.g., other RAs, students we were supervising) or who were currently taking courses with us. We also sought the assistance of Institution 1, Institution 2, and Institution 3, which X and Y were affiliated with, to contact students who qualified for our study and to vouch for us.

Upon receiving emails from students confirming their interest in participating, we then arranged to have a quick phone conversation to discuss the study. This pre-interview “check-in” allowed us to build relationships with our participants by explaining our motivations behind our study, and enabled students to ask questions about the study and share any concerns. Following our conversation, we emailed them the informed consent form and requested that they email a signed copy of the form. We offered to physically mail copies of the informed consent forms if they were unable to open the forms, but everyone in our study knew how to open and sign the forms electronically. (While other researchers, such as Roberts, et al., 2021, used apps to more easily get signed consent forms, our respective universities do not have policies regarding the use of such apps when signing informed consent forms). Once we began interviewing our first set of students, recruitment became easier. They told their friends about our study, some of whom contacted us. Hence, we found that convenience and snowball sampling that relied primarily on established contacts was a better recruitment tactic than social media posts. These practices of relationship building ensured that a relationship of accountability with our students was established, thus overcoming students’ initial reluctance to participate in our project.

Our participants’ concerns over their privacy and safety also informed how we proceeded with the conduct of focus groups. For example, prior to hitting record, we told our students to do “what made the most sense” to them in terms of whether they wanted to keep their videos on or off, whether they wanted to display on the screen a pseudonym or their real names, and whether they wanted to answer all or some of the questions. We also wanted to make sure that students discussed their experiences freely, so our interviews were semi-structured, with researchers starting with the question “how has life been like for you during the pandemic?” We had themes that we hoped to cover that included sources of support, changes in people’s “encounters” with the public, experiences with online learning, and health, but we largely allowed students to take the conversational lead in determining what they wanted to discuss. Mindful of the need to be self-reflexive and to dismantle, as much as possible, power hierarchies between the researcher and students, debriefing check-ins took place between the two people assigned to the focus group after each session, enabling consideration of new approaches for later interviews. These debriefing check-ins were useful in acting as a “check” to ensure that issues of power were addressed directly. For instance, at the mid-way point, for the City Y research team, we realized that it made more sense for the RAs to lead the interview, and the researcher to be the back-up interviewer (while staying off camera) to ensure that students felt safer and freer to converse. We also recognized that, in doing so, our RAs could share their own experiences as international students from Asia with the students in our study and facilitate stronger rapport with the students.

Overall, forging stronger relationships of trust, facilitated partly by shifts in our recruitment and facilitation approaches, produced more thorough forms of participation and enriched the overall content of the focus groups. For example, we found that our participants made use of Zoom’s chatbox in order to support and build on each other’s contributions and ultimately to direct the flow or tenor of the focus groups according to their interests. Indeed, it was sometimes hard to keep up with the conversation taking place while also reading the chatbox where students shared their thoughts and at times even had parallel conversations. In the chatbox, students sent private messages asking the researcher questions of clarification. Overall, the ability to use multiple modalities to converse with the group on Zoom deepened our engagement with each other, bringing a creative energy to our sessions.

In relation to the question of politics and ethics in virtual research, we would note that participants’ use of the chatbox helped decenter the power held by the researcher, who conventionally is the one leading the conversation by determining the questions to be answered, by enabling various entry points into the conversation for students. Using the chatbox allowed students to reinforce or to ask questions about each other’s points, to provide counterexamples to what was being shared, to share resources such as websites that provide information on immigration issues, on student stipends during the COVID-19 pandemic, and other resources, to share news articles that may be of interest, and even to share GIFs or memes that added insights to the conversation. For example, during one focus group, one student shared a version of a meme that circulated across social media showing a cartoon of a masked Asian woman with the statement, “being Asian is not a crime,” placed across the photo. Sharing this meme reinforced the point being raised during that focus group on how being visibly Asian during the COVID-19 pandemic has intensified some students’ experiences of anti-Asian racism. Echoing Abidin and Zheng’s (2021) observations that the circulation of humorous and pointed memes enabled members of the Asian diaspora to form virtual communities with each other during the pandemic, students’ ability to bond with each other during our focus group sessions enabled a collective sense of camaraderie and “catharsis” (2). As Iloh (2021) further argues when calling for the use of memes in qualitative research projects, memes deepen conversations, have symbolic value for the participants, make participants feel closer to each other, and, most importantly, “infuse agency, humour and creativity into the research process”. Alongside the chatbox, students at times also used Zoom emojis, which gave participants and us as researchers more “insight into how someone is feeling” (Wilkerson et al., 2014). Doing so helped generate bonds and trust between focus group participants and added greater nuance to the discussion.

Such visual modes enabled our participants to shape the conversations beyond verbal modes such as stories, thus decentering, even in a small way, the central place of the verbal in qualitative methods such as focus groups and interviews. There is also something specific to Zoom that enables a multi-modal form of engagement with research questions. Traditional in-person interviews and focus groups do not typically make room for visual ways of answering questions, unless specifically prompted by the researcher, typically before the event of the interviews and focus groups themselves. In contrast, online environments become resources for participants to draw on in their engagement with the research. Unlike in traditional in-person research, virtual research enables participants to be intertextual with their engagement, that is, to bring in specific texts such as online news articles or viral memes alongside their verbal answers to focus group prompts. There is also a certain kind of harmony between the virtual mode of our research and the rise of virtuality in our participants’ lives during the COVID-19 pandemic. As they—and many of us—transitioned to virtual modes in our teaching, learning, and socializing during the pandemic, digital language such as memes and emojis have themselves arguably become even more ubiquitous. It is thus not surprising that their use extends to our research subjects’ participation in our study. We believe that qualitative research that considers visual and written forms of communication—versus only considering verbal accounts—enable a more nuanced appreciation for various dimensions to participants’ narratives.

Virtual research platforms are thus political technologies not only because they are situated in regulatory and institutional regimes, but also because they open up space for new forms of support and community, new modes of participation, and more extensive approaches to knowledge sharing, compared to in-person focus groups or interviews. The ability to communicate both verbally and through texts, memes and gifs, to laugh and commiserate with each other, and to offer resources was a source of joy and even empowerment for research team members and the students in our study, an important outcome in the face of anti-Asian racism.

Flexibility and care as methodological commitments in the face of the ongoing realities of COVID-19

Transnational feminist queer methodologies take seriously that researchers’ and participants’ positionalities and well-being matter in the conduct of research, particularly when it concerns topics that are intimately related to researchers’ and participants’ lives (Browne et al., 2017). Keenly aware that we (as researchers and our research team) and our research participants are situated in specifically racialized ways vis-a-vis COVID-19, we undertook our research during the COVID-19 pandemic anticipating that we needed to be adaptable and flexible. In concert with transnational feminist queer methodologies, our process was informed by a care ethics approach. All of us, as members of the Asian diaspora in Canada, were experiencing in real time, both the more general and the specifically racialized effects of the pandemic. As emerging research about the pandemic has shown, racialized communities are hit harder by COVID-19 (Tungohan, 2020; Cheung, 2020; Fung, 2021). Some members of the research team had family members, either in Canada or in other countries, who worked in public-facing jobs that made them vulnerable to COVID-19. Some lost jobs as their workplace came to be rendered inessential during the pandemic. Yet others had family members across the world who got sick from COVID-19. Everyone also had to adjust to these new realities while having to keep up with the pressure of either living alone and apart from family members or living with family and having to be responsible for child, elderly and community care. All of these pressures, combined, created situations of high stress for research team members at different points during the research, exacerbating baseline, pre-COVID-19 pressures, such as ongoing health issues or care responsibilities, that some members of the research team already bore.

Consequently, there were time periods when both authors and different members of the research team had to step back from the project. These assorted pressures extended the timeline we had originally anticipated for the project. Contrary to our original expectation that we would be completing data collection by September 2020 and that we would be analyzing and disseminating results by the end of 2020, we ended up extending our RAs’ contracts to December 2020 and are, at the time of writing in mid-year 2021, analyzing and writing our data. These experiences reinforce studies showing the detrimental impacts of COVID-19 on researchers’ academic productivity, with members of racialized communities who have care responsibilities facing the biggest challenges (Pereira, 2021; Staniscuaski, et al., 2021). COVID-19-related research and personal challenges that prolong research timelines show all too clearly how the temporal demands of academia, which push a publish-or-perish mindset, are at odds with the temporal realities faced by people during the COVID-19 pandemic. A transnational feminist queer methodology that centers care above other considerations mean that for us, recognizing the well-being of research team members was our foremost priority over and above academia’s demands. Even if some of us may have wanted to push through with our original timelines, it was more important and more ethical for us to ensure that research team members worked at a pace that made sense to them.

The ongoing realities of COVID-19 meant that we also had to shift our research agendas as we progressed with our research. Seeing that transnational feminist queer methodology emphasize adapting to complexity, we understood a constantly shifting research agenda as a crucial part of our praxis.

We initially envisioned that our project would focus on the experiences of Chinese international students. We thus began by recruiting students from China and Hong Kong. We imagined, due to the anti-Chinese discourses that were circulating across mainstream media through characterizations of COVID-19 as a “Chinese flu” or as “Kung-Flu,” that Chinese international students would be at higher risk of stigmatization. We also anticipated that COVID-19, similar to SARS, would be contained within a few months. Yet as COVID-19 spread across Canada and across the world, we witnessed in real time new policy changes that presented challenges to all international students. For example, the Canadian government passed policies that limited international travel and that closed borders, thereby compelling international student visa holders to decide whether to go home to be with their families or to stay in Canada for an indefinite period of time. Our respective institutions also had constantly shifting policies on on-campus housing, course work, and immigration and mental health support for international students. It was important for us to know these shifting contexts in order to facilitate a more engaged and more responsive conversation during our focus groups and also to have a more nuanced understanding of the circumstances that can help explain students’ responses to our questions when analyzing our data. Ethically, we also felt, given our roles as professors within our respective institutions, that we had to be familiar with policy developments in the event that students asked us questions about the content of specific policies. Although all focus group participants received a “resource list” that contained the names, contact information and websites that they could consult when facing health, labor, immigration, and school-related pressures, we felt it was our responsibility to have updated information on hand if students asked.

Aside from keeping track of new policy developments and accordingly shifting our research questions, we also had to be aware of larger discourses circulating in our communities. Specifically, we observed not just an increase in the types of anti-Asian discourses around us but also an uptick in the number of anti-Asian attacks across North America, targeting not only Chinese nationals but also all members of the Asian diaspora, from Filipino elders in Vancouver and in New York, and a Korean international student at University Z (Hong & Alden, 2021). Indeed, assaults targeting an Indigenous woman in Vancouver and a Latina woman in Los Angeles—both mistaken for Asian—tell us that anti-Asian racism relies, at least partly, on Asianness not as biological or demographic reality, but as a quality that is read on people’s bodies (Place, 2020; Rumball, 2020). We then realized that COVID-19 led Asian diasporic communities and other racialized communities to be vulnerable to anti-Asian attacks and that restricting our study to examining the experiences of Chinese international students meant limiting the range of experiences that we could capture in our study. Thus, we decided, in the summer of 2020, to expand the scope of our study to include all Asian international students, opting not to list possible countries where our students could be from and instead leaving students to self-select. In the next section, we discuss the implications of our decision to do so.

Transnational Lives and Geopolitical Considerations as Methodological Concerns

Our decision not to impose geographic limits on who could participate in our study meant that more students opted to participate. We realize, in hindsight, that rigidly defining who could participate meant that we imposed spurious boundaries on who counts as an Asian international student. In reality, experiences of heightened anxiety due to the pervasiveness of anti-Asian racism and constantly shifting state and university policies during COVID-19 were commonly felt. Widening our pool of possible study participants allowed students to challenge us on our conceptions of Asian identity. They reminded us of the complex nature of immigration trajectories, as well as of categories like “Asian” themselves. For example, students of Asian descent but who had citizenship in countries that were not in Asia also technically fit our study criteria. Prior to making this change, we had interviewed 10 students in three focus groups (5 in each city) from either China or Hong Kong. After making this change, our participant pool widened to include students from Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, India, the Philippines, Singapore, and New Zealand, leading to a total number of 40 students participating in our project. (Of this number, 25 were undergraduate students and 15 were graduate students). While the majority of the students we interviewed were still from China and/or Hong Kong (N = 23)— reflecting, perhaps, how international students from China and Hong Kong constituted the majority of all international students in our respective institutions—including students from other countries made our data richer. Doing so allowed us to understand how students’ experiences were affected by variations in different countries’ containment and public health policies and their advice for residents abroad (e.g., some consulates issued warnings to their nationals to be extra cautious because of high instances of anti-Asian racism) and also by how their encounters in the public were affected by how their bodies were read (e.g., some students were perceived as being more visibly Asian).

In fact, an awareness of the complexity of students’ transnational lives required us to be attentive to geopolitics, and particularly how our participants’ relationships to citizenship and nation-state regimes might affect their participation in our research. For instance, we were aware of pre-existing geopolitical tensions between different countries, which our RAs informed us has also affected interpersonal relationships among students. At the time of our study, for example, there were ongoing pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, with activists campaigning against what they saw as China’s incursions against Hong Kong’s civil liberties. When organizing focus groups, we made a concerted effort not to place students from countries that had tense relationships with each other. We worried that doing so would be unproductive for our research, as well as unethical. We did so in order to minimize conflicts so that our participants would feel as safe as possible during the course of their participation in our research.

As we noted previously, we also learned during the course of our research that potential participants calibrated their willingness to participate in our research based on their concerns about possible surveillance of online activities by their home governments. This was especially the case for participants who might have taken part in our research from their home countries. As researchers, we had to contend with people’s concerns over the geopolitical realities of their lives and contexts. Even while we would have wanted greater participation, we felt that the ethical thing to do was to honor people’s decisions and concerns rather than try to convince them to participate. In short, our students’ transnational lives meant that we had to make adjustments to our research focus and approach.

As the research progressed, we came to appreciate that our participants had much more complex relationships to notions of “home” and “belonging” than we anticipated. While we justified our project’s focus on international students in part by pointing to how they tended to live away from their families and hence might experience more stress during COVID-19 because they did not have access to the same support networks as domestic students, we found out that this assumption was only partially true. Advances in information technology meant that our students could communicate easily with their families back home and also access news and other information that informed how they experienced the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, virtual modes of communication meant an increase in the intensity and type of contact they had with their families beyond what they were used to when living in the same country, a finding that Valerie Francisco-Menchavez (2018) saw in her study of transnational Filipino migrant families. We altered questions that we asked in later focus groups, making sure that we did not have preconceived assumptions about our students’ access to family support. In that vein, we also recognized that some students may not actually be as reliant on their biological families for support as we assumed. The notion of “chosen families” became salient in some focus groups, with some queer students indicating their immersion in communities of care both in Canada and in other spaces that were crucial to their well-being. This aligns with queer research that documents some LGBTQ migrants’ understandings of their migration as a personal tactic of “coming out” and “coming into being” (Vasquez del Aguila, 2012). By using transnational feminist queer methodology, we became mindful of the hegemonic interpretations that we initially held regarding support networks, and amended our approach not to assume that biological kinship networks were more important than other relationships.

Another example of adjustments that we made involved needing to more fully account for how our students were physically present in Canada but also had ongoing presence in other countries. As stated earlier, some students were reluctant to share their experiences and their opinions because there were no guarantees of free speech or freedom of expression in their “home” countries. If they expressed an opinion contrary to the official stances of their countries, they and their families risked facing pushback. In fact, as our RAs informed us, some countries saw international students as their “ambassadors” abroad, which meant that students may be wary of “complaining” and thus representing their countries negatively. After learning of these dynamics, we then understood that it would be more ethical to rephrase certain questions, depending on the dynamics of the focus group. For example, rather than directly asking about students’ specific, individual experiences, we sometimes opted to ask general questions about “international students” experiences. One question that tended to elicit the most responses was one where we asked students to give advice to fellow international students. In redirecting the focus away from their individual experiences toward Asian international students as a collective, students were able to situate themselves as part of a larger community and subsequently understand their experiences in relation to the group; thus, they could plausibly claim that they were not speaking for themselves but were merely sharing their observations of Asian international students’ broader concerns.

Of course, in making this point, we do not want to reinforce the stereotype of certain countries as being “dangerous” and “backwards.” As researchers who are members of the Asian diaspora, we are accountable to the larger Asian diasporic community in Canada, and recognize all too well the pitfalls of stereotypical modes of representation. In thinking more deeply about issues of “voice” and representation, we would like this project to celebrate—rather than shy away—from complexity, given that we are working with students with transnational lives.

On this note, a transnational feminist queer methodology provides a useful framework from which to examine our data. Rather than assuming singular explanations of our data, we seek to disrupt hegemonic narratives and think of the multiplicity of forces, including transnational and embodied ones, that could be at play. The choices that students make can never be understood solely as a by-product of individual decision-making but should be contextualized by looking at structural influences.

Conclusions, Implications, and Possible Research Agendas

In concluding this paper, we wish again to emphasize that using transnational feminist queer methodology that emphasizes accountability and ethics and that celebrates complexity and care was key in helping us work through the larger ethical questions underpinning our study. When reflecting on the ethical considerations that we had to navigate during our virtual qualitative study, we realize that there are more complex situations that emerge when doing research with transnational migrants and leading a research team consisting of members with transnational lives. As a result, the process that we followed went beyond what our respective universities’ REB suggested. While the substantive change that our universities’ REB suggested involved giving more information on the informed consent form informing research participants where Zoom servers are located and that we, as researchers, cannot absolutely guarantee their confidentiality, the REB process could not account for the additional complications wrought by those who live in the diaspora.

In this process of virtual qualitative research, we realized that working with research participants who have transnational lives means that notions of risk and consent cannot only be considered from the standpoint of the individual who is participating in the project. Instead, it is paramount that risk and consent be considered from the standpoint of the individual’s larger, transnational community and location in global, geopolitical contexts. Researchers must therefore ascertain whether participating in this project would present social risks for the individual and for their “communities” (broadly defined). Researchers should be open to reframing certain questions so the individual being interviewed is not asked directly about their specific experiences but are instead asked to speak more generally about their observations. Researchers should also seek ways to increase participants’ comfort levels with VOIP by having a debriefing session where they note the different functionalities of the software and, more crucially, by giving participants the option of turning their videos on or off or using pseudonyms during their session. Above all, researchers should not treat virtual research platforms such as Zoom as simply tools, but must instead account for how they are political technologies that can constrain participation, as noted in our discussion of participants’ concerns over their surveillance as transnational subjects). At the same time, as we noted in our discussion of memes, these platforms can also enable new modes of virtual participation and relationship building that extend those that occur in in-person forms of research.

Furthermore, researchers should, as much as possible, think about the research limitations posed when prioritizing speech over other modes of communication. On this note, VOIP such as Zoom have important features like the chatbox. Rather than shying away from using this feature, researchers should try to explore how the chatbox can be used by participants to reinforce certain points, to add their own opinions, to share with the researchers and with each other articles and resources that may be of interest, and to circulate memes and GIFs that enhance the conversation at hand. The availability of multiple forms of communication to decenter the focus on “speech” arguably enhances participants’ comfort levels by deepening the conversation at hand. Other Zoom features, such as emojis, can help build community by providing visual affirmations of listeners’ thought process when listening to other people’s accounts.

There are nevertheless unanswered questions that emerge from our approach to virtual qualitative research with transnational migrants. The transnational migrants in our study are international students from Asian countries and are, as a group, largely comfortable with and have good access to new technologies. Our reflections and suggestions may not make sense for other groups of transnational migrants, especially those who are less comfortable with or have less access to new technologies and digital connectivity (c.f., Wilkerson et al. on virtual research with what they call “hard-to-reach” populations). For instance, other groups of migrants, such as migrant farm workers or migrant domestic workers, may find it difficult to access the Internet.

Finally, as researchers slowly transition to post-COVID-19 realities, it is also crucial to undertake more research on what parts of virtual qualitative research actually engender deeper data. Although we chose virtual research because this was, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the only option available for us, there were numerous aspects of Zoom-based qualitative research that we would like to retain in future qualitative projects, namely the ability to have multiple forms of communication and the ability to gather together dispersed individuals without having to incur the costs of traveling. Zoom also encourages greater accessibility. For example, while the “live-transcription” feature on Zoom was unavailable when we were conducting our focus groups, this feature enhances accessibility and may also enhance community-building in that participants can read (and not only listen to) what others are saying. Rather than thinking of virtual qualitative research as an inferior alternative to in-person research, perhaps researchers should see virtual qualitative research as a different way of doing research, one necessitating distinct methodologies and methods.