Читать книгу Researching in the Age of COVID-19 Vol 3 - Группа авторов - Страница 7
ОглавлениеSu-ming Khoo and Helen Kara
Since the global COVID-19 pandemic began in the early months of 2020, researchers have had to respond to new limitations, reassess and rethink their ongoing and near-future research. Some research is about emergencies like the current COVID-19 health emergency, some research is not specifically about emergencies or disasters but takes place in a context already affected by emergency or disaster. Some research has nothing to do with emergencies or disasters at the outset but must deal with one (or more) that unfolds as the research proceeds. As the world continues to deal with the reality of COVID-19 in the longer term, researchers are reminded that emergency and disaster situations are ongoing in many contexts or may occur at any time. The challenges of researching in an emergency-affected context also present a crucial opportunity to critically reflect on the fundamental purposes, assumptions and issues driving that research, as well as more practical issues around the choice of methods and manner of implementation.
The eruption of a global health emergency like COVID-19 offers important opportunities to reassess the role of creativity and ethics in research. It surfaces broader and deeper ethical questions beyond adherence to the necessary but limited formal procedures of standard institutional research ethics approval. Researchers in every part of the globe have responded to the new challenges of researching amidst the COVID-19 pandemic in diverse, thoughtful and creative ways – from adapting their data collection methods to rethinking researcher–researched relationships and fostering researcher and community resilience, while accommodating different needs for care.
Creativity and ethics are linked in research. New problems stimulate creativity, because they disrupt given assumptions and present demands for original and workable ways to solve problems. Creativity is often assumed to be a good in itself, but this isn’t true. Creativity itself may be a force for maleficence as well as beneficence, hence Sternberg argues that creativity should be tempered by wisdom (Sternberg and Lebuda, 2019). The context of crisis or emergency disrupts the ‘normal’, exposes the normative assumptions that underlie research methodology, research questions, research design and research practices. Ethical problems are central in all research – all researchers are required to adhere to certain ethical codes and receive ethics training, though this, of course, is no guarantee of ethical conduct (Mumford et al, 2010).
This book is the third volume in a series of three Rapid Responses. Together, we hope that these books help academic, applied and practitioner researchers worldwide to adapt to the new challenges COVID-19 brings. The first volume focused on researchers’ rapid responses and reassessments, and the second volume connects researcher, participant and community care and resilience with common concerns with vulnerability and wellbeing. This third volume explores dimensions of creativity and ethics, bringing to the fore the question of how creativity and ethics are connected. Creativity brings to the fore the possibility of questioning the given, including assumptions and frames of thought, their normative bases and expected political and social responses that we do not usually bother to scrutinize (Roitman, 2013), opening up our fields of research anew. In thinking creativity into research, we should be reminded that moral creativity is itself a key domain, turning research towards the exploration and resolution of moral dilemmas. From a different starting point, creative activities such as writing, storytelling, photography and so on are intrinsically generative and we might think of doing art and craft as ethical undertakings in their own right that deserve to be fostered in, and through, research work (Runco and Nemiro, 2003).
The first section of this volume explores explicitly creative approaches to researching in the age of COVID-19. In Chapter 1, Ricardo Sosa and Lisa Grocott discuss the use of design methods in practice-informed academic research. They explore the space between design and research, seeing creativity as particularly important for researchers involved in responding to the ‘wicked’ and ‘messy’ problems connecting health, economic, political and societal issues amidst unprecedented disruptions. In Chapter 2, Naomi Clarke and Debbie Watson explore the use of crafting and making during the COVID-19 lockdowns among an international group of 315 participants, recruited through social media. Their diaries, photos and craft making were used for elicitation within a narrative inquiry design, helping the researchers understand how people’s lives are going during a difficult time. In Chapter 3, Duduzile S. Ndlovu uses writing in poetry and prose to reflect on how her own migrant identity as ‘Zimbabwean in South Africa’ and her academic identity as a researcher come under strain under the conditions brought by COVID-19. Using the framing of migration research in the global South, she interrogates her position as an insider–outsider researcher and the clashing assumptions that come with different identities and assumptions. In Chapter 4, Virginia Braun, Victoria Clarke and Naomi Moller explore how people make sense around COVID-19 rule breaking in New Zealand and the UK using the story-completion method. Story completion is a powerful method for researching a controversial topic in a difficult situation, because instead of asking for views directly, it uses expressive writing which may also have the added advantage of therapeutic benefits.
The second section of this volume further explores concerns around research ethics and ethics generally in widely varying geographical, cultural and socioeconomic settings. The chapters in this section raise multiple questions about how research is conceptualized and conducted. Chapter 5 by Vanessa Malila reviews the research literature to get to grips with the tensions and contradictions between ‘morality’ and ‘economics’ in current research ethics and policy discourses responding to COVID-19 in the UK. She notes a blurring line between deontological and utilitarian ethics and acknowledges the difficulties of trying to think about the ethics of an unprecedented situation from the middle of that situation. Chapter 6 by Etivina Lovo and four colleagues discusses additional challenges that COVID-19 pandemic restrictions brought to the conduct of research about human research ethics in the Fijian Islands and Kingdom of Tonga. They offer rich examples to illustrate that the necessity of shifting to online research does not erase the need to ensure that research is conducted in a culturally appropriate and linguistically competent way. This chapter offers a window into sophisticated ethical concepts and language influencing the conduct of research and that have much to offer to the field of human research ethics from Tongan and Fijian indigenous culture and thought. In Chapter 7, Nancy Rios-Contreras discusses her research on forced displacement on the Mexico–US border. Forced migration is a nexus of crises, while migration control can be said to be a social disaster with crisis manifestations. She critically questions the ethics of conducting fieldwork during this complex nexus of concurrent social disasters, including the social injustices raised by the Black Lives Matter protests, to which the pandemic adds further detrimental impact. In Chapter 8, Eboni Anderson and a team of eight colleagues further explore the underlying issues for Black, Indigenous and people of colour (BIPoC) in the US. Their focus on health disparities research identifies who suffers most from inequitable access to care, treatment and resources. Health disparities research offers an in-depth understanding of the demographic framework (such as race, ethnicity, gender, age, socioeconomic status, marital status and ability status) necessary for addressing COVID-19 with broader ethics in mind.
The final three chapters, comprising the third and closing section of this volume, address different ways of approaching creativity and ethics through collaboration and co-creation. In Chapter 9, Emma Waight discusses the use of the photovoice method to understand doctoral students’ experiences of working from home. Using this method to document and share students’ writing practices and experiences, Waight presents photovoice as a participatory method with the co-creation of knowledge at its heart. Chapter 10 by Kathryn Coleman and a team of seven others from the University of Melbourne – Science Gallery Melbourne collaboration offer a view from SciCurious Research Project which is an intergenerational research collective. They see the COVID-19 pandemic as a ‘comma’, a creative breathing space and valuable opportunity to reconsider how they might do speculative inquiry and co-research-creation. This chapter highlights the benefits that co-research creative spaces can offer to young people, involving them in doing the kind of research they want to do, where they want to do it. The closing chapter, Chapter 11 by Rafael Szafir Goldstein, Rosana Aparecida Vasques and Maria Cecilia Loschiavo dos Santos offers a perspective from doing arts-based design research with youth at, and from, the margins, using the example of COOPAMARE, a highly successful waste-pickers cooperative working with people living on the streets in São Paulo, Brazil. Given the constraints imposed on research by the pandemic situation, the researchers used a video art exhibition and storytelling to ‘mirror’ with Finnish research counterparts how COOPAMARE works to overcome the challenges of poverty and living on the streets.
Taken together, these chapters share creative practices, research experiences and deeper reflections from researchers around the world at an especially challenging time. Researchers in diverse fields, at different stages of their research careers and from all parts of the globe are responding to a global pandemic and reassessing their research approaches and methods with creativity, critical reflection and ethical commitment. We hope that you will find important questions, innovative and useful ideas and inspiration in these chapters that will ultimately benefit your own research projects.
References
Mumford, M.D. ,Waples, E.P. ,Antes, A.L. ,Brown, R.P. ,Connelly, S. ,Murphy, S.T. , andDevenport, L.D. (2010) ‘Creativity and ethics: The relationship of creative and ethical problem-solving’, Creativity Research Journal, 22(1), 74–89.
Roitman, J. (2013) Anti-crisis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Runco, M. A ., andNemiro, J . (2003) ‘Creativity in the moral domain: Integration and implications’, Creativity Research Journal, 15, 91–105.
Sternberg, R ., andLebuda, I . (2019) ‘Creativity tempered by wisdom: Interview with Robert J. Sternberg’, Creativity, 6(2): 274–280
