Paper short abstract:

When meeting people and travelling abroad has been restricted, researchers are in a new situation. I study the experiences of the first female cyclists that participated in the Olympic games and need to seek new solutions on how to make transnational research in five different countries.

Paper long abstract:

The year 2020 and a global pandemic has marked a remarkable shift in doing distance work and having online meetings that might have been difficult to even think before. In many cases live meetings can well be relocated online and this can even be very practical, but restrictions in travelling and meeting interviewees bring new challenges to researchers. My research on the first women that participated in Olympic cycling in the Los Angeles Olympic Games in 1984 requires interviewing six of the women in their home countries – or so I originally thought. In my paper I will discuss possible solutions to doing transnational research in a situation where face to face interviews abroad are not possible. Online interviewing offers one answer, but it also raises new questions. Together with technical solutions new kind of ethical and methodological issues must be considered. Is something left out of the interview when people are not present in the same space? How does online communicating effect the atmosphere and the expressions used? What kind of new possibilities does online interviewing offer?