Paper short abstract:

We identify the opportunities and challenges our team has faced in researching local responses to the coronavirus pandemic. Unable to carry out traditional ethnography, we designed an online questionnaire and conducted targeted interviews. We also relied on researchers' autoethnographic accounts.

Paper long abstract:

Doing research on local experiences during the coronavirus pandemic has presented opportunities as well as challenges. The biggest challenge was not being able to carry out traditional face-to-face ethnography, which compelled our team to explore a collection of new-to-us methods. The pivot point has been an online questionnaire asking people about their experiences. We are also interviewing people who may not have access to the internet or who would prefer to talk to us, even if remotely. We have also asked people to submit photos that document their experiences. Finally, we found that our own experiences with COVID-19, including reports from those in our social networks, provide opportunities for authoethnography.

In addition to putting methods together in new ways, doors have opened for new university-based collaborations between units and people: Involved in our project are three academic programs (Anthropology, History, Psychology) and the Center for Diversity and Inclusion. Graduate and undergraduate students alike have been involved in many capacities. We are all involved in collecting and analyzing data, even as we struggle through online meetings.

The goal of our project is to create empathy and the valuing of diversity and inclusion. We aim to do this through public exhibits giving voice to varieties of experiences and through reports to community leaders. We look to feminist methodological values of reducing hierarchies within our team, as well as between our team and the informants and communities we work with. We seek to develop an ethic of (inter)acting and listening on all levels.

The opportunity we have embraced has been in facing an opening of a new kind of space that has not only allowed but demanded creativity in how we work together, what we consider ‘data,’ and how we put it together to find meaning.