Exceptional Uncertainty: Early-Career Anthropologists in the Corona Pandemic
The Covid-19 pandemic has proven to significantly affect the current state of life and work of early-career fieldworkers and ethnographers, as they have had to manage the subsequent restrictions imposed on their fieldwork. Based on discussion at the Research Infrastructures and Emotional Challenges workshop, we highlight the challenges faced by Ph.D. and post-doctoral researchers and propose institutional measures for supporting and facilitating their research projects.
Due to emphasis on long-term fieldwork necessary for conducting research in the field of anthropology, the imposed travel restriction and social distance measures to counter the pandemic are exerting enormous additional strains on early-career anthropologists already subjected to the pressures of a precarious labor market, and uncertain professional trajectories (see the contributions of Liliana Avezedo, and Carole Amman and Marina Richter.) While fieldwork always included uncertainties before the pandemic, the current situation exacerbates them by disrupting researchers’ fieldwork plans and gives rise to multiple layers of uncertainties concerning methodological, bureaucratic, and immigration issues with implications on mental health, private and emotional lives, and research possibilities.
Uncertainties: Methods/Bureaucracy
To manage the methodological uncertainties tied to the pressure of having to adapt fieldwork to the current circumstances, researchers were suddenly forced to rethink the concept of a field site and move to online spaces, proceed with archival work, and collaborate with local researchers on sometimes shaky ethical grounds. Structural concerns, as researchers in anthropology, are disadvantageously considered a “specialty cohort” with professional and career path implications, reinforcing existing power structures inside academia. In addition, the researchers not only have to deal with additional ethical questions concerning the protection of interlocutors’ anonymity and safety within digital ethnography or proxy-fieldwork but also worry about censorship, surveillance, and the corporatization of social media and other online data.
Furthermore, some have reported the bureaucratic inflexibility and lack of communication by universities, funders and other relevant institutions as obstructing research and have, therefore, difficulties in understanding and responding to the changing conditions of fieldwork. Additionally, immigration issues come into play for researchers working for institutions outside of their country of citizenship, who have had to face a loss of support networks and visa expiration dates.
Emotional Challenges
The multi-layered uncertainties, the pressure to perform and to meet deadlines take a toll on the emotional and personal life of researchers, with implications on their mental health (see Leslie Ader’s contribution). Above all, the increased blurring of the boundaries between work and home life is proving to be detrimental to the emotional and personal lives of many. Especially vulnerable are those with caring duties, high-risk family members, or the ones who are themselves at high-risk, as well as those with financial struggles.
The Way Forward
We are urging relevant funding bodies and institutions to take notice of the enormous challenges confronting researchers (especially during early career) reliant on methods of intensive fieldwork. While the pandemic poses acute problems, many reflect longer-running structural conditions of precarious academic work. The narrative to be creative and take the pandemic as an opportunity for their research and professional development hides the missing structural conditions to do so. We, therefore, recommend the following institutional measures towards achieving improved conditions of research:
- Legitimize archival and digital methods, while recognizing their limits and applicability.
- Recognize the disruption of the Ph.D. timeline as force majeure for the current cohort of Ph.D. and post-doc researchers in future recruitment and evaluation.
- Recognize, foster and provide institutional support for peer support groups and informal exchange networks among early-career researchers.
- Enhancing Availability and Accessibility of psychological counseling while sensitizing supervisors/employers to potential psychological issues of their staff members/Ph.D. students.
- Reduce bureaucratic uncertainty through installing clear procedures for communication, feedback and responses on matters of contracting and extension of contracts.
- Adjust funding structures to the uncertainties of anthropological fieldwork in general and during the pandemic, through measures of
– inclusion of local co-researchers and research assistants with proper remuneration and facilitating co-authorship arrangements;
– flexible fieldwork funds, allowing for non-bureaucratic inclusion of budget items such as paying local assistants, paying for additional technical equipment, or purchasing mobile data for interlocutors;
– fostering meaningful forms of reciprocity between the researchers and their interlocutors, for example through budget allocation for follow-up visits;
– extension of contracts and fellowships for those who are not able to carry out fieldwork as planned. - Digitalization needs to be introduced with care and feasible roadmaps through
– meaningful inclusion of digital methods in Ph.D. training through budget allocation and capacity building;
– recognizing existing and new inequalities that underline the digitalization of research and having procedures to minimize these;
– investing in research infrastructures that accommodate the application of technologies in conducting fieldwork, starting with equipment and software for digital methods;
– providing clear and reasonable ethical guidance for digital data collection, processing and analysis, with proper attention to how issues of anonymity, surveillance and intimacy in digital research, as well as protection measures for online researchers and research participants;
– providing training in the practical application of the data protection law for all researchers. - Recognize the caring burdens of individual researchers whose family members or themselves belong to at-risk groups, make allowance for caring time, and accept CV gaps that arise from caring duties.
- Provide meaningful support for international researchers in dealing with financial and immigration difficulties, while enabling continuing research abroad.
- Install new funding schemes (for example emergency funds or writing fellowships) targeted at young researchers struggling with existential issues such as self-funded Ph.D. researchers losing income during the pandemic, those whose funding runs out, those needing more time because of pandemic-induced delays, or international researchers in need.
Minh Nguyen is a Professor of Social Anthropology at Bielefeld University and Thomas Stodulka is a Junior Professor for Social and Cultural Anthropology and Psychological Anthropology at Freie Universität Berlin.
For a full version of this text, please contact minh.nguyen@uni-bielefeld.de or thomas.stodulka@fu-berlin.de
Acknowledgement: This contribution is based on a discussion at the German Anthropological Association’s Autumn Academy Fieldwork Meets Crisis on 21-23 October 2020, especially the workshop Research Infrastructures and Emotional Challenges, with additional inputs by Julia Nina Baumann (Freie Universität Berlin), Mercedes Figueroa Espejo (Freie Universität Berlin), Ulrike Luttenberger (Deutsches Historisches Institut Paris), Lena Schick (Philipps-Universität Marburg), and Josephin Schliephacke (Freie Universität Berlin).
