by: Mneesha Gellman, Emerson College (visit author’s website) Cliquea aquí para el artículo en espanol I have a confession to make. I have been avoiding writing this post for a long time, because secretly, I worry that what I have to say about digital fieldwork will be discouraging, unhelpful, Read more…
by: Jannis Grimm, INTERACT Center for Interdisciplinary Peace and Conflict Research, Freie Universität Berlin Critical junctures such as the Covid-19 pandemic can disrupt hitherto unquestioned modes of research and thereby offer researchers a chance to break new ground. In fact, driven by the need to adapt, within a span Read more…
by: Elizabeth Wanucha, Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS), Georgetown University – Qatar
Tips for Hosting Virtual Research Workshops
The Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) at Georgetown University-Qatar (GU-Q) is a research center…
by: Ato Kwamena Onoma, CODESRIA
As the COVID-19 outbreak spread to West Africa in early 2020, I took an interest in the scapegoating of returning Senegalese migrants based in Southern European countries by their fellow citizens in Senegal.
by: Mohammad Isaqzadeh, Princeton University
I arrived in Kabul, Afghanistan, on January 1st, 2020, to conduct two rounds of survey, studying the relationship between violence and religiosity. It was such a euphoric moment for me.
by: Thomas S. Benson, University of Delaware
My research explores environmental sustainability in cities, and smart cities. My dissertation focuses on four cities – Washington D.C. and Boston in the U.S., and Leeds and Bristol in the UK – which I examine on two fronts.
by: Danny Hirschel-Burns, Yale University
March 2020 was an exciting time for my dissertation research. After two months in Bogotá, Colombia, I made my first trip to my field site of Orillas, Antioquia…
by Aili Mari Tripp, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Wangari Maathai Professor of Political Science and Gender & Women’s Studies
Covid-19 hit just as I was about to embark on a summer of fieldwork in 2020 in Uganda and Botswana, followed by research over winter break and the following summer (i.e., 2021) in Mauritania and Namibia.
by Jack Rechsteiner and Betsy Sneller, Michigan State University
Like many research programs that rely on ethnographic fieldwork, traditional sociolinguistic research relies heavily on researchers building rapport with participants by spending time in their communities and sitting down with them in person to audio-record informal conversations.
by Tonya Dodez, Indiana University
Many scholars often face significant logistical and empirical limitations on the “best case scenario” execution of their research projects. Both progress and setbacks are inherent parts of the research process.
by Leah R. Rosenzweig, Development Innovation Lab, University of Chicago and Yang-Yang Zhou, University of British Columbia
As graduate students, we first met each other and became friends in Tanzania, working on our dissertations. We were conducting focus groups, collecting administrative data, and experimentally assessing programs.
by Lucia Vitale, UC Santa Cruz
So much of what we do as researchers relies on a foundation of trust built over time with the communities where we carry out research activities. When mutual trust is present, we are invited into the lives, minds, and networks of our research participants, which helps animate our research questions.
by Tracy Lucky Mensah, Georgetown University
Beginning in the last week of January 2020, I nonchalantly followed world news from the TV screen at my gym in Arlington, VA about a virus outbreak in China. I did not seem to be bothered much about the happenings. After all, media discussions made it seem distant from the rest of the world.
by: Laura Yares, Michigan State University, and Sharon Avni, City University of New York
Our current project, Jewish Learning in Cultural Arts contexts, questions the prevailing assumption that meaningful Jewish learning needs to occur in formal, outcome-driven contexts.
by: Carolyn Holmes, Mississippi State University
In the midst of the February 2021 winter storm that gripped much of the continental United States, a picture circulated widely on social media. While rolling blackouts and power grid failures plagued Texas, tens of thousands of people, including major players in Texas’ oil and gas industry, members of Congress, and other high profile figures, shared and retweeted an image of a helicopter de-icing a wind turbine.
by: Nicole Wilson, MIT
Like many other PhD students in comparative politics, over the past year I have been trying to figure out how to make progress in my work without traveling. Most of my research is focused on Lagos, Nigeria, and I had planned to spend part of 2020 collecting data there.
by: Christopher Gore, Ryerson University; Jennifer Brass, Indiana University; Elizabeth Baldwin, University of Arizona; Alesha Porisky, Northern Illinois University
We arrived in Nairobi, Kenya, the last week of February 2020. Before officially entering the terminal at Jomo Kenyatta Airport, medical staff, wearing masks, stood at the end of the passenger boarding bridge.
by: Emma Louise Backe, George Washington University
On March 26, 2020, South Africa went into a nation-wide, mandatory lock-down to control the spread of the coronavirus, a disease many feared would impact the hundreds of thousands of immuno-compromised South Africans with HIV, tuberculosis, and other chronic illnesses.
by: Jennifer Hart, Wayne State University
I was going to write a different book. For the last five years, I had been planning a book that traced debates about the shape of Accra, Ghana’s capital city, from the late 19th century through the present.