Making the case for ‘care-full’, ‘slower’ research: Reflections on researching ethically and relationally using mobile phone methods with food-insecure households during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

This paper reflects on the research process and ethics of doing research with low-income households in Stoke-on-Trent, UK, during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with five mothers experiencing food insecurity, I argue that it is imperative that researchers employ ‘care-full’, slow, flexible methodologies situated within everyday lives to ensure that research with vulnerable and precarious groups of people is not exploitative, especially during times of crisis. The emergency public health measures introduced to contain COVID-19 in March 2020 acted like a brake on my research activities, slowing things down, limiting the methods available to me, and ultimately, provoking a reimagining of my original research design. I make two contributions. First, building on feminist geographical scholarship on care and reflexivity, and calls for ‘slow’ research that prioritises the shifting needs of researchers and participants, I suggest adopting a relational approach to take account of participant subjectivities in order to minimise disruption in their everyday lives. Second, through discussing the ways in which I employed the mobile phone to continue gathering data with participant mothers during COVID-19, I build on nascent geographical and methodological conversations about the role of technologies in the design and implementation of care-full research. In highlighting the limitations of the mobile phone as a research device in this context, I extend current limited understandings of utilising mobile phones to gather data in the course of conducting research with marginalised people.