 Hello, everyone. I'm Poppy Gerard Abbott. I'm a PhD sociology candidate at the University of Edinburgh, and I've conducted a number of research projects during the pandemic, including my own PhD fieldwork on sexual and gender-based violence in the higher education context. So that has involved policy analysis and interviews. Plus, on top of that, another research project for the creation of a Scottish government-funded gender-based violence charter for further and higher education. And that has involved 10 months of focus groups and interviews on a Scotland and UK-wide scale involving hundreds of graduate students and staff members. So today I'm going to speak about valuing the methodologies that the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed to us, but I speak to this topic largely from a sort of qualitative and mixed methods place. So, as mentioned at the beginning of this session, I think Rob outlined that there was some centre for research methods sessions, and one of these involved mapping out our research journeys as if the research was a river. And this got me thinking about the environment and conditions of conducting research specifically during the pandemic. So in my river map, which is on this slide, I depict the sailing experience to be stormy with lots of challenges and barriers such as physical obstacles and changing and unexpected weather conditions, representing all of the methodological, ethical data collection and policy-related problems brought by the pandemic and lockdown. And so sailing the ship in such conditions is a distinct and valuable skillset and set of methods that are much more complex than knowing how to sail the boat in smooth and simple waters. So why would we dismiss the sailor who has the skills and experience to navigate stormy waters? Why would we not see pandemic research skills and methods as distinct, unique and valuable? So there are specific characteristics to research during COVID-19 that I argue makes it valuable and distinct. So firstly, similar to other crises, the pandemic offers us and our research intense insights into inequalities. And I argue that the pandemic has not created new inequalities, but has exacerbated and held a microscope to age old ones. And what we are seeing during the pandemic, so for example, fatality from the virus being shaped by socio-economic factors like race, class and occupation. And as you see on this slide, the profoundly complex challenges of creating successful policy during crisis, the tensions between science, policy, public education, and also other trends such as widespread fear of unemployment and economic crash and skepticism towards the political and scientific establishments. These are all absolutely nothing new. They are all part of historical patterns of social trends. By doing rather than delaying our research during this time, our research can take seriously the backdrop or canvas of COVID-19 in which events of interest, such as resistance, division, public discussion and internet discussions are taking place and exploring how our specific participant groups have been impacted by the pandemic and subsequently capturing those impacts as data in itself. So I think that pandemic research is an opportunity to capture much richer insights due to inequalities and social trends being much more pronounced. Almost like the issues we are studying are in their most concentrated form right now, and by studying coronavirus, we are automatically studying our topics in richer ways. Likewise, evidence is growing around how internet spaces are a fascinating reflection of social life offline or sometimes known as in real life. For example, political organising, malicious hacking, hate crimes and gender-based violence. By seeing what our research topic and methods look like in online spaces, we gain new insights into our topic in their digital mediations. This is where I brought in observation-based methods to document such mediations as data. For example, I documented the online harassment and abuse from bots and from people directed towards my research projects, which is common with feminist and gender-based violence projects. So the pandemic has also shone light on inequalities in research practices and methods. So feminist campaigners and researchers have been highlighting the ways in which the pandemic has actually increased accessibility concerning basic basic rights that women and people with disabilities and health conditions have been calling for for decades in order to participate equally in everyday mundane social and working life. So this includes, for example, click and collect medicinal services, basic measures for inclusive workplaces such as working from home, condensed hours, well-being breaks, flexible deadlines and setting your own schedule, much of which has been placed for decades in opposition to capitalist productivity. Digital methods have been seen to increase accessibility for researchers and participants alike, allowing for focus groups and interviews to take place without travel and supporting the diversification of engagement such as anonymous focus groups, chat-based interview methods, diary entries and digital art-based methods. And because accessibility has been a core discussion during the pandemic, we have seen accelerated advancements in functionality on digital platforms and simultaneously researchers and facilitators have become more aware of the previously exclusionary ways that they practice methods. So, for example, I regularly run women's circles, especially for sexual and gender-based violence survivors, and I obviously had to digitise them during the pandemic. And I became more conscious of adding on the Eventbrite pages some copy that said something along the lines of, if you have any needs, just get in touch. And as a result, I had, for example, a black deaf woman and a woman with a stutter asking to come along, asking for adaptations to be made such as subtitles and to ask for extra time when they spoke. So, I added these to my facilitation and these are people that would have never previously come along to a women's circle, especially women's circles ran by white women and women that are perceived to be able-bodied. So, pandemic research has revealed a duality of amplified projections of social life alongside the embracement of more flexible, reflexive and creative methods with the latter being a result of inequalities being exacerbated among participant groups with hard-to-reach groups becoming even more hard-to-reach during the pandemic, such as parents and people in certain professions such as education, the NHS or sex workers. And this offers an opportunity to gather data on why they are hard-to-reach because, as I said before, the reasons why will be nothing new, they will just be enlarged during the pandemic. And simultaneously, we can confront our own methodological assumptions and biases where we often exercise prescriptiveness about certain methods being the right ones to reach our desired groups and certain people being the owners of the knowledge that we need. And this traditional approach can lead to rigid frameworks, whereas what I've found is that the struggles of participants accessing research and research accessing participants creates a case for creative and mixed digital methods. And such an approach also teaches us to look at who and what isn't there and the voices we are not hearing in our research as data that is just as important as the data that is there. And these gaps should inform our methodological reflexivity. So, for example, concerning the research behind the gender-based violence charter for further and higher education, where we did focus groups and interviews across Scotland and the UK, we found that we were just not reaching certain groups. So, for example, mature students, sex worker students and students in remote and rural locations. By bringing in practitioners that work with these groups, we got a lot of the data that we were looking for, and we got tips on how to engage these groups as practitioners explained to us why they weren't engaging during the pandemic. We then changed our methods accordingly and brought in, for example, anonymous focus groups, telephone interviews and texting-based interviews. And likewise with a third research project I conducted during the pandemic for an organisation called Advanced Higher Education, where I reviewed all of the gender-based violence policies of all Scottish colleges and universities. I found that there were many gaps in policy and governmental strategy adherence that could have led me to drawing incorrect conclusions, such as this institution does not have this policy in the public domain, therefore it doesn't exist. But by diversifying my methods and bringing in just a handful of interviews with the people that work with those policies, I filled these gaps and I drew truer conclusions that, for example, a policy wasn't absent. It was just being created or they were having XYZ problems in creating the policy. So, overall, I found digital methods were highly conducive rather than hindering as digital and distance methods during COVID are being commonly framed as such. But because of their flexibility and feasibility, I actually found that I was able to tap into participant groups that the project may have never even touched before. So, being reflexive and creative with our methods during the pandemic is fundamentally, I argue, about stepping outside of the qualitative, quantitative research and methodological binary, which has long, and stepping outside of this binary has long been advocated by feminist research approaches. So, challenging the mantras and the essentialist epistemological assumptions we have that certain methods and people are inherently the best to produce certain knowledge forms. And finally, I just want to touch on the lessons that COVID-19 methodologies have given us in regards to the political impact of our research. So, this sort of confronts the question, isn't all research for the sake of change, does all research aim to ultimately improve people's lives, and I'd be interested in your thoughts in regards to those questions. And so, political change is often something we attribute to the end of our research when our data is written up and disseminated, we talk about impact and so on. So, rotsing research during the pandemic has showed me that political impact is instead a process during the research, and there are many ways that this can be achieved through our methodological choices. So, for example, I found that focus groups over interviews alleviated isolation for gender-based violence victim survivors and had sort of a consciousness raising effect. I also found that the increases of ethical risk of doing gender-based violence research during COVID meant that I had to increase my support infrastructure for participants, and this meant that they accessed support services that they had no idea about. I found that many people also, to my surprise, were enthusiastic to attend focus groups about gender-based violence because the supportive group dynamics allowed them to decompress and the topic permitted them to talk about something other than COVID. So, this really challenged the assumptions I brought to the work that reaching people under COVID pressures would just be impossible. And then, even with our literature reviews, who we cite are political acts. So, doing research during the pandemic has really got me thinking about how before, during and after our research we can create political impact. And then conducting research during COVID, lastly, also reconceptualised ethics for me. So, we often, I found, we interchangeably talk about ethics and political impacts as referring to participants, but as conversations about workers' rights and well-being have increased under the pandemic and sort of taken centre stage, this has offered opportunities to think about the importance of ethical responsibilities towards ourselves, towards research of safety, well-being and progression. So, this can include, for example, improving our IT skills, engaging in IT training, and new ways of managing our research processes, such as pacing our research in ways that allow us to take breaks, the extension of funding and research timelines, postponing when you have caregiving responsibilities, creating and maintaining digital boundaries between researchers and participants that then teaches us boundaries offline, and lastly, increases in peer support and solidarity efforts and collaboration as we see in action in these sessions. So, I hope that has given you some food for thought. I've linked in some longer talks here and some resources I have written for use by anybody, so please do take advantage of those. Thank you very much for listening.