New Resource: Doing Fieldwork in a Pandemic

A new crowd sourced document provides resources for researchers struggling to conduct traditional face-to-face research during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Initiated and edited by Professor Deborah Lupton, a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and Professor at UNSW, the document shares methods for doing fieldwork in a pandemic – specifically, ideas for avoiding in-person interactions by using mediated forms that will achieve similar ends.

The document titled “Doing Fieldwork in a Pandemic“, was initially directed at ways for how to turn fieldwork that was planned as using face-to-face methods into a more ‘hands-off’ mode. However, people have added useful material about ‘born digital’ research (content already generated on the internet by online interactions), which provides an alternative source of social research materials if researchers decide to go down that path.

The document quickly grew to almost 40 pages in length and now has useful contributions from researchers from all around the world.

“A team of six have also translated the whole document into French so that it can be shared among the French-speaking world”, says Professor Lupton.

Professor Lupton is now working on a new innovative methods webinar series, ‘Breaking Methods‘, which she has launched on YouTube. This series offers short-format presentations on new and exciting methods that can be used as open resources for teaching, learning and research training.

Access the Doing Fieldwork in a Pandemic document here.

View the Breaking Methods Webinar Series here.