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Qualitative longitudinal methodologies for crisis times: Against crisis exceptionalism and ‘helicopter’ research
Abstract
In this introduction to the collection of papers ‘Qualitative Longitudinal Methodologies for Crisis Times’, we argue that two main characteristics or ‘qualities’ of qualitative longitudinal methodologies (QLMs) can be identified for researching crisis. The first is that QLMs can function to repudiate crisis exceptionalism. The papers denounce the discrete and time‐limited, instead impressing the ongoingness of crisis from the past, the present, and into the future. The second overarching point made in the introduction is that QLMs protect against ‘helicopter’ research, a heightened risk when studying crisis times. Together the papers offer a close and complex introspection on the use and outcome of QLMs in spaces and times of crisis from the perspective of researchers undertaking the research, and in multiple instances, research participants enrolled in them.
... This qualitative approach is characterized by seeking a deep and contextualized understanding of social phenomena, employing flexible and participant-centered methods for data collection and analysis [7]. In line with this, non-experimental design implies that variables are not deliberately manipulated [8]. In the case of this study, the phenomena were observed in their original context, without manipulating the study variables, which allows the research to be carried out in their natural environment. ...
This research article analyzes the management of corporate social responsibility and the sustainability of a Peruvian agribusiness, considering invention, adaptability and organizational ambidexterity. The importance of invention is highlighted to develop innovative practices that improve sustainability. Adaptability is crucial to respond to external changes and environmental regulations. Organizational ambidexterity, which combines efficiency in existing operations and innovation in new areas, is identified as a key factor in achieving a balance between economic, social and environmental objectives. The general objective of this research was to know the corporate social responsibility actions that contribute to the sustainability of a Peruvian agroindustry. The methodological design of this study was of an applied type, with a qualitative approach at a descriptive level, it followed a cross-sectional, non-experimental approach, for data collection the technique of interviews and observation was used through the interview guide instruments and observation guide. The findings found in this research were sustainability actions, clean technologies, sustainable technologies, microbiological analysis, recycling, packaging design, pilot studies, food safety, sustainable development, sustainable practices, sustainable integration, awareness campaigns, local development, emissions reduction, ethical and sustainable practices, waste management. It is concluded that corporate social responsibility actions that contribute to the sustainability of Peruvian agribusiness represent a significant change in how this company approaches its roles and responsibilities towards society and the environment.
This paper considers the ways in which research projects linger beyond their ‘official’ endings, and how to deal with this. Building on conversations in human geography and related disciplines on slow research, performed endings, and the practical and socio‐political complexities of data storage and analysis over time, I relate some experiences with my research on the Finnish Saimaa Ringed Seal, which resurfaced years later via a new project. Should I re‐engage or leave it as a discrete period of previous work? An end to funding or finishing the write‐up does not necessarily sever the connection between a researcher and their data. I argue that social research can be an ongoing, slow, and personal process. My aim is to encourage both new and more experienced researchers to reflect on how we think about data and analysis when projects may live on in our minds or in boxes in a cupboard.
Research and policy during the Covid‐19 pandemic often dovetailed with an established interest in how nearby urban nature spaces can encourage human well‐being. Yet, to define the focus upfront in this way is to overlook the many ways in which different groups may draw on experiences in diverse natural environments to get through challenging times.
This paper draws on a qualitative study with 98 university students in Innsbruck, Austria. As part of a co‐production approach, and using a range of exploratory and inductive methods, we examined how they coped with lockdown restrictions and other challenges to everyday life during the pandemic between March and November 2020.
The study's longitudinal design reveals how their nature relations evolved over the lifetime of the pandemic. Participants showed a strong identification with the Alpine nature surrounding Innsbruck and deeply mourned opportunities to go there during quarantine at the start. With the relaxation of restrictions, they briefly celebrated the return of access to these spaces before nature experiences were soon blended back into their everyday lives as before.
The findings present an account of nature spaces being valued during the pandemic precisely because they were away from urban spaces nearby that had come to feel strange as a result of the lockdown restrictions. This leads us to reflect on the importance of how exactly people engage with local nature and how nature connections change in response to the evolving pressures and preoccupations that shape everyday life, both for young people and others. We emphasise the value of contextual sensitivity in future research and policy hoping to foster nature benefits, both during crisis situations such as these and more generally.
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This paper employs a longitudinal lens to examine the temporal dimensions of urban neighbourhood regeneration. Specifically, it focuses on four neighbourhoods in Bristol, UK, which were subject to the flagship New Deal for Communities programme from 2000 to 2010. By combining past research into the (then) emerging impact of the NDC with data from more recent enquiries into the daily lives and experiences of residents after the programme's end, the paper considers if and how these neighbourhoods were altered and whether the NDC programme continues to have impact beyond its funding period. The aim is not simply to evaluate the programme's success and legacy, but also to reflect on how past policies interact with present and future temporalities. As such, community perspectives of continuity and change are used as a basis for discussion of the ways in which the urban present is assembled. Within this discussion, the impact of the coronavirus emergency and austerity measures on these neighbourhoods is considered. Both crises underline that regeneration is a dynamic and vulnerable process that does not follow a predetermined or linear trajectory. For this reason, the paper emphasises the need to move beyond singular, snapshot inquiries and instead adopt a longitudinal approach that considers developments beyond the immediate and visible outcomes of urban policy.
This paper is based on the ReFashion study which used mixed‐method longitudinal research to track and amplify the experiences and coping mechanisms of 200 women garment workers in Cambodia as they navigated the financial repercussions of the COVID‐19 pandemic. It develops the idea and practice of ‘feminist longitudinal research’ (FLR) through re‐centring the too often marginalised knowledges and ways of knowing of Cambodian researchers and research participants. Hearing and learning from their experiences reveal the labours and care‐work involved in the ‘doing’ of longitudinal research during a time of extraordinary crisis, and the potential for feminist consciousness raising and solidarity that can arise both within and beyond the confines of an academic study. The paper advocates for geographers and other social scientists to go beyond technically‐framed issues of participant ‘attrition’ and ‘retention’ in longitudinal studies to think more creatively and critically about the process of longitudinal research and what it means for those taking part in it. FLR not only evidences the temporally contingent gendered impacts of a phenomenon, but can be distinguished by its intentionality and/or potential to challenge the patriarchal status quo, both in the lives of researchers and participants.
Drawing on 203 quantitative surveys with women workers in Cambodia and a further set of semi-structured interviews with 60 original participants, this paper is one of the very first to present empirically grounded research from garment workers on the financial challenges of navigating the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. We show how in the making of clothes to be worn by Western consumers, poorly paid garment workers are reducing their eating to repay long-term debts and those newly taken on to cope with wage reductions resulting from factory closures, suspensions, and cuts in working hours. In its examination of this phenomenon, the paper improves understanding of the gendered contingencies of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ‘wearing out’ of garment workers through their attempts to reproduce life under (pre-existing) conditions of privation. We argue that the debt-hunger nexus is not new but reflects problems within Cambodia’s capitalist development, and capitalism itself, as the costs of social reproduction and risk are privatised and financialised in the body politic. The COVID-19 pandemic is consolidating relations with financialised life such that they will outlast its duration and have long-lasting implications for workers and their families globally.
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Emotions and the emotional labour of researchers have been increasingly recognised in social science disciplines, with many researchers providing personal and reflexive accounts. Such debates are less well recognised in health-related disciplines, particularly public health, who remain at earlier stages of valuing and understanding qualitative research. Drawing on personal experiences and methodological reflections gathered from a qualitative study, undertaken with young people over the course of 16 months during the COVID-19 pandemic in England, UK, the aim of this article is to offer further insight into the impact of researcher emotion, by specifically focussing on longitudinal, diary-based methods. My reflections are framed as three overlapping and intersecting themes. First, that qualitative longitudinal methods (and diary studies in particular) have enormous potential to curate rich emotional narratives. Second, that despite these positives, there are tensions or conflicting dynamics in using a method which helps to explore young people’s emotions but also involves emotional labour for the researcher. Third, that greater attention should be paid to ensuring ethical care for researchers, particularly those engaging with qualitative longitudinal and/or creative methods. Such strategies should not solely rely on self-care and must be considered at institutional or funding body level. To this end, my personal experiences and reflections, as well as those from previous offerings, are used here to underpin a framework for researchers or research teams embarking upon novel qualitative longitudinal methods: 1. Do not underestimate emotional burden. 2. Ensure meaningful debriefing is available. 3. Establish boundaries. 4. Make space for emotion throughout fieldwork as well as during analysis and writing (‘entering and exiting the field’).
The COVID-19 crisis has placed unique restrictions on social researchers in terms of how they conduct their research. It has also created opportunities for adaptation and critical reflection on methodological practice. This article considers how the unanticipated use of remote qualitative methods impacted processes of research connection and connectivity in qualitative (longitudinal) research. The reflections are based on fieldwork conducted for a qualitative longitudinal study about the parenting journeys and support needs of young fathers. We elaborate our key strategies and provide worked examples of how the research team modified their methods and responded in the crisis context. First, we consider questions of connection when seeking to (re)establish and retain connections with project stakeholders and marginalised participants through the pivot to remote methods. Second, we reflect on how processes of maintaining participation and interaction were impacted by practical and technological issues associated with the digitally mediated forms of connectivity available.
Qualitative longitudinal research (QLR) has grown in prominence and popularity since the 2007 themed section on the subject in this journal. This new themed section reflects on how QLR has been mobilised and made sense of in recent times. This article showcases QLR’s distinctive way of knowing and understanding the social world and how it can illuminate the processes through which policy can enhance, or indeed inhibit, the well-being of individuals and groups within society. This state of the art article focuses on QLR as a valuable but tricky approach. It argues that QLR can enhance qualitative research in social policy by fostering sustained policy engagement and development, and that this is especially useful for policy-making in relation to socioeconomic disadvantage. It also explores cross-cutting methodological dimensions pertinent to QLR’s distinct approach, such as its enhanced ethical considerations, which are also integral to research with people at high risk of socioeconomic disadvantage. The article concludes with possible future directions and developments for QLR as a methodology.
The practice of Global North (i.e., “richer” globalized countries located in the northern hemisphere, except for Australia and New Zealand) researchers making roundtrips to the Global South (i.e., “poorer” developing countries located around the tropics and in the Southern hemisphere) to collect materials and then process, analyze, and publish results with little to no involvement from local collaborators is referred to as “helicopter research” or “parachute research”. At best, local scientists provide logistical help and knowledge of the local community, such as field site guiding, identification of local organisms, translation from and to local languages, and facilitating resources to foreign scientists. However, often, these necessary actors in the scientific process receive little to no retribution for their work and knowledge. For example, a systematic problem in academia is that local scientists and graduate and undergraduate students are often not offered coauthorship in manuscripts for which their contributions were essential (e.g., project planning, logistics, and knowledge of local biodiversity). Even worse is that research remains unavailable for them and others who contributed substantially, since in most cases, peer-review publications are available behind a paywall, and they are written in English, which is the second or third language for many Global South researchers. Furthermore, local communities where Global North scientists come to conduct helicopter research are usually left out of broader impacts and outreach efforts, as these tend to happen in Global North communities.
Helicopter research is a way to perpetuate colonization practices, and power imbalances are critical in perpetuating helicopter research. For example, Global North researchers often set the research agenda based on priorities of their funding agencies, which, in many cases, are decided upon by those same researchers sitting in decision-making committees of those very agencies. All too often, proposals are developed without a deep understanding of problems and priorities of Global South countries where the anticipated research will take place. Global South collaborators are rarely invited to brainstorm and set the research agenda for their needs. This opens the door for unequal partnership with research objectives that may be irrelevant for Global South collaborators, who then, are forced to accept an already funded proposal due to lack of research funding within their own countries or institutions. Thus, power and politics behind science are interconnected and are a driving force behind helicopter research.
Helicopter research is a problem that also happens within Global North and within Global South countries, where dominating cultures perpetuate abuse on historically marginalized communities, including those of indigenous people, people of color, people from lower socioeconomic status, etc. This is an increasingly complex problem that has been intensely discussed in other papers and for which extensive guidelines exist. Here, we address the problem that exists specifically between researchers from the Global North—often members of the dominating culture—toward people of the Global South who may or may not be members of the dominating culture. We propose 10 simple rules for avoiding helicopter research for better, collaborative, and non-colonial science between the Global North and the Global South.
The term ‘crisis’ is omnipresent. The current corona virus pandemic is perceived as the most recent example. However, the notion of crisis is increasingly deployed as a signifier of relevance, rather than as an analytical concept. Moreover, human geography has so far little contributed to the interdisciplinary crisis research field which is fixated on the temporal aspects of crisis but neglects its spatiality. Against this background, the first aim of the paper is to demonstrate the value of thinking about crisis analytically. Therefore, we introduce theoretical knowledge developed within a recently emerging literature on crisis management. Second, we demonstrate the relevance of including geographical thinking into crisis research more systematically. Based on the TPSN‐framework by Jessop et al., we illustrate spatial dimensions of the ‘corona crisis’, its perception and handling in Germany. The empirical references are based on media reports.
How lives are governed through emergency is a critical issue for our time. In this paper, we build on scholarship on this issue by developing the concept of ‘slow emergencies’. We do so to attune to situations of harm that call into question what forms of life can and should be secured by apparatuses of emergency governance. Through drawing together work on emergency and on racialization, we define ‘slow emergencies’ as situations marked by a) attritional lethality; b) imperceptibility; c) the foreclosure of the capacity to become otherwise; d) emergency claims. We conclude with a call to reclaim ‘emergency’.
Toxic pollution is a form of violence. This article explores the gradual brutalities that communities surrounded by petrochemical infrastructure endure over time. Contributing to political geographies of violence and environmental justice, this paper puts the concept of ‘slow violence’ into critical comparison with work on ‘structural violence’. In doing so, the paper makes two key contributions: First, it emphasizes the intimate connections between structural and slow forms of harm, arguing that structural inequality can mutate into noxious instances of slow violence. Second, the paper pushes back against framings of toxic landscapes as entirely invisible to the people they impact. Instead of accepting the standard definition of slow violence as ‘out of sight’, we have to instead ask the question: ‘out of sight to whom?’ In asking this question, and taking seriously the knowledge claims of communities who inhabit toxic spaces, we can begin to unravel the political structures that sustain the uneven geographies of pollution. Based on long-term ethnographic research in a postcolonial region of Louisiana, nicknamed ‘Cancer Alley’, this paper reveals how people gradually ‘witness’ the impacts of slow violence in their everyday lives. Finally, drawing on the notion of ‘epistemic violence’, the paper suggests that slow violence does not persist due to a lack of arresting stories about pollution, but because these stories do not count, thus rendering certain populations and geographies vulnerable to sacrifice.
Focusing on migrant social networks, this paper draws upon the sociology of time to incorporate complex notions of temporality into the research process. In so doing, we consider firstly, the challenge of going ‘beyond the snapshot’ in data collection to capture dynamism through time. Secondly, we apply the concepts of timescapes to explore ways of addressing the wider context and the interplay between spatiality, temporality and relationality in migration research. We argue that integrating a mixed methods approach to SNA, crucially including visualisation, can provide a useful methodological and analytical framework to understand dynamics.
This article relates the biography of Aisaatou, an Islamic Fulani woman in North Cameroon, to the question of how to engage in ‘responsible’ feminist knowledge production. Through a longitudinal study, a time–space is created in which the ‘other’ is not constructed in terms of distance, spatial and temporal (Fabian 1983), but is included in the anthropological knowledge production and self-reflection. This is done through dialogues and discussions concerning the context of occurring changes – waves of Islamic fundamentalisms, new forms of Islamic schooling, access to new media etc. – within the ‘other's’ society, but also by including the people concerned in the ‘Time of Anthropology’, thus respecting their agency in knowledge production. The initial naïve knowledge and academic perspective faded in reality. By sharing this experience, I explore how the methodology of a longitudinal study attributes a special dimension to feminist research and (anthropological) knowledge production in general.
This paper showcases Oral Histories and Futures interviews as an approach and series of innovations for researching crises with qualitative methods. It presents new possibilities for methodological innovations to embrace the multi‐directional and longitudinal temporalities of crises across the life‐course and the life‐course of crises. As an exciting avenue for methodological enhancement, I build on and bring together techniques across Oral Histories and creative biographical interviewing. Developed as part of a recent study exploring reproduction, economic crisis and the life‐course, with this approach I aimed to elicit people's experiences and opinions about their pasts, present and futures by innovating with traditional qualitative methodologies. I outline five areas of innovation—and associated observations, opportunities and obstacles—including a focus on younger generations, on the future, the inclusion of reflexive activities, interviewing in the midst of crises, and remote interviewing. Conclusions highlight what can be learned from an Oral Histories and Futures approach for thinking about socio‐temporal horizons.
Building on my ongoing ethnographic research with people living with HIV in different European countries, the paper focuses on RD, a Catalan man I have interviewed three times since 2014. In RD's life narrative, ‘crisis’ is a recurring theme including both the most blatant forms, like the severe housing crisis in Spain that followed the global financial crisis, and the most ordinary ones like domestic violence. Analysing the impact of crises in RD's perception and experience of the present, interwoven with the past(s) and the future(s), the paper discusses two main benefits of longitudinal ethnographic research. First, it allows to capture how crisis is not just a moment or a phase in RD's life, but acts as context generating a recurring experience of an ‘uncanny present’ shaped by logics of return and repetition of the past, and anticipation of the future. Second, it supports RD's self‐awareness around his ability to navigate the unknown when experiencing the ‘uncanny present’; this highlights the ethical care dimension entailed by such methodology.
The violence of precarious labour migration is often represented in popular and policy accounts through episodic frames that emphasise particular—often sensationalised and extreme—aspects and moments of more complex and mundane experiences. These depictions commonly appear under the labels of ‘modern‐day slavery’ and ‘labour trafficking’. This paper advances a participatory methodology aimed at elucidating more complex temporalities experienced by precarious migrant labourers, drawing on a project with male migrant workers in Singapore. The methodology developed for this project centres on written diaries/narratives authored by the participants over periods ranging from one to three months. These detailed narratives document struggles—physically, relationally, financially and emotionally—in the context of post‐labour destitution. These struggles appear as both ‘everyday’ difficulties and longer‐term problems, with both temporalities rendered visible as a form of slow violence. This methodology fuses key principles of qualitative longitudinal research (QLR) methods with participatory action research (PAR) to develop a methodological orientation to temporally extenuative experiences of violence that are visible through processes that draw on participants as key producers of knowledge and advocates for change. As a way of engaging migrants' mundane post‐labour struggles, this methodology allows for tracing of the longer‐term and cumulative impacts of precarious migrant labour through participants' own frames of reference.
This paper reports on an investigation into female academics' experiences of living and working through the COVID‐19 pandemic in the United Kingdom (UK). A diary, diary‐interview method (DDIM) was used to gather qualitative data from 25 participants about their lives during the period March 2020–September 2021 and diary and interview data have since been curated and published in an open access digital archive. The paper argues firstly that in recording and interpreting change over time in the context of the COVID‐19 pandemic, the methodology constitutes a qualitative longitudinal research (QLLR) approach. Secondly, that the method has the capacity to convey temporal disruption and complexity, aligned with notions of crisis as fast, slow and ongoing. Thirdly, that Nixon's theorising of ‘slow violence’ can be used to frame the impacts of the pandemic as gradual, unseen and banal despite potentially negative implications for female academics' career progression. Finally, the paper argues that gathering this data through DDIM and publishing it in a publicly accessible digital archive represents a necessary form of witness with the potential to be utilised for future interventions.
Understanding young people's lives through a focus on their micro‐geographies has been central for exercising young people's voices through research. However, such a focus has also neglected the multiple and complex realities of growing up that ripple throughout their lives, resulting in calls for more research to go beyond capturing daily snapshots of experience. This paper acknowledges that decades of research with and for young people living on city streets has underpinned activism and challenged western child rights discourse, helping to ensure that abuses and violations of street young people's rights are confronted. Yet, much of this research draws attention to lives lived in present moments – the difficulties encountered and capabilities displayed. It does not account for the temporal fluidity of how young people's realities are future impacted by slow crises and challenging daily life experiences as they grow towards adulthood. This paper explores the crisis temporalities of young people's street lives through a youth‐led ethnographic longitudinal approach. The paper focuses on 18 youth researchers and over 200 of their peers' experiences of research over three years while living on the streets of three African cities. The paper discusses the challenges of undertaking longitudinal research alongside the temporal affordances of surviving urban informality and the compounding effects of slow crises on present and future‐oriented survival. These affordances emerge as street youth respond to daily trials, experience setbacks, crises, triumphs, and failures, yet show resilience and employ capabilities. The paper concludes by demonstrating the crucial importance of ethnographic longitudinal research for policy and practice to ensure that youth who age on the streets, and their families, are supported in accordance with social justice concerns.
This paper draws on a four‐year qualitative study that examines changes to legal processes related to the response to domestic violence in Seattle that began before and continued through the COVID‐19 pandemic, to examine a series of crisis temporalities that were exacerbated by the pandemic and associated lockdowns. In reflecting on the crisis temporalities that mark this research project, I underscore how such crises can also create conditions that lead to long overdue social change. In this case, the modernization of a court system that for too‐long served as an obstacle to survivors’ legal protection and facilitated abusers’ ability to engage in slow violence during Domestic Violence Protection Order (DVPO) hearings. This paper thus highlights the “temporal affordances” of longitudinal research that enables analysis to better understand the factors that motivate transition over time, particularly those in traditional institutions like the legal system.
This paper sets the idea of slow violence into dialogue with trauma, to understand the practice and legitimisation of the repeated damage done to certain places through state violence. Slow violence (Nixon R (2011) Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) describes the ‘attritional lethality’ of many contemporary effects of globalisation. While originating in environmental humanities, it has clear relevance for urban studies. After assessing accounts of the post-traumatic city, the paper draws insights from feminist psychiatry and postcolonial analysis to develop the concept of chronic urban trauma, as a psychological effect of violence involving an ongoing relational dynamic. Reporting from a three-year participatory action research project on the managed decline and disposal of social housing in a former coalmining village in north-east England, the paper discusses the temporal and place-based effects of slow violence. It argues that chronic urban trauma becomes hard-wired in place, enabling retraumatisation while also remaining open to efforts to heal and rebuild.
As embedded systems, Internet and communications technologies not only have material footprints, they exist within and maintain historically specific societal structures and power dynamics. Despite growing awareness of the ubiquity of online harassment and bullying, there remains a disconnect between the embodied experiences of technology facilitated violence and legal and social recognition of harm. Looking at a notorious case out of Nova Scotia and the anti-cyberbullying legislation it inspired, I consider the ways such violence is made visible and invisible, looking specifically at the persistent cognitive disconnect between the virtual and the corporeal, and the language that enacts or justifies such distinctions. Formed within and against persistent ontological perceptions about technology and the nature of the virtual, I elaborate on slow violence in two different registers: the differentially experienced and embodied slow violence of persistent online threats and abuse, and the slow violence of responses to those communications.
In recent years, scholars have developed a vocabulary for describing scenes of insecurity, precarity, and disorder too slow to achieve recognition as crises. Concepts such as slow violence, for example, depend on forms of delay, deferral, attrition, and accumulation whose ordinariness exacerbates suffering. But not enough attention has been paid to how those mired in the experience of protracted harm themselves use time to respond to this pernicious condition. In this article, I focus on the deliberate manipulations of time that characterize responses to slow violence by examining a campaign to halt the construction of a trash incinerator in south Baltimore. The incinerator-which posed toxic risk for residents in exchange for the promise of clean, green, renewable energy-was to be the latest in a steady stream of impositions that have plagued local bodies since the nineteenth century. Here, I scrutinize this history and the consequences of gradual industrial incursion on risk perceptibility. I then analyze the ways in which time has been slowed, sped up, reordered, and strategically punctuated by parties on multiple sides of the incinerator campaign. In the process, this article offers up a set of tools that, beyond depicting time as a medium of violence, also specify temporalities of resistance and refusal. Taken together, they suggest that slow violence, rather than merely obstructing response, invites creative forms of temporal orchestration and moral punctuation.
Lauren Berlant explores individual and collective affective responses to the unraveling of the U.S. and European economies by analzying mass media, literature, television, film, and video.
In this paper, we explore a range of media representations that center on what we identify as crisis subjectivities. These are subjects presented as embodiments of economic and political crises, coming out of a context best described as the propagation of crisis as an ordinary, everyday occurrence. We trace the development of three main types of crisis subjectivities (resilient, recuperable, and abject) within this context, focusing on the ways in which these subjectivities are subsequently read back as the cause of broader structural crises, especially through their connection to discourses of postfeminism and the postracial. Formed through normative divisions of the population, i.e. racism, classism, and sexism, crisis subjectivities are also presented as disrupting normative temporality on multiple levels, interrupting narratives of progress, individual life trajectories, and the temporality of crisis itself. Within this context, normative discourses of time as linear, constant, and progressive are replaced by representations that emphasize time as discontinuous and disjunct, defined by unexpected accelerations, delays, and deferrals. Finally, we explore the way these crisis subjectivists and temporalities are articulated to discourses that suggest that the proper responses to crisis are individual resilience and self-management, while de-emphasizing structural analysis and collective action.
Scholarship on criminal careers and desistance from crime employing longitudinal methodologies has paid scant attention to sociological and anthropological debates regarding epistemology, reflexivity and researcher positionality. This is surprising in light of a recent phenomenological turn in desistance research wherein (former) lawbreakers’ identity, reflexivity and self-understanding have become central preoccupations. In this article I interrogate aspects of the methodological ‘underside’ of qualitative longitudinal research with criminalized women through an examination of the surveillant position of the researcher. Focusing on methods, ethics and power, I examine some contradictions of feminist concerns to ‘give women voice’ in research involving re-tracing an over-surveilled and highly stigmatized population. I reflect on the effects of researcher positionality through a conceptualization of re-tracing methods as, at worst, a form of sociological stalking.
This paper outlines the state of the art in qualitative longitudinal methodology, reflecting on more than 10 years of development since a previous special issue on qualitative longitudinal research was published by the International Journal of Social Research Methodology in 2003. The papers presented in this special issue emerge from a methodological innovation network that brought together an international community of researchers in order to map new frontiers for the method. This paper summarises the development of the method from a design to a sensibility, identifying three new frontiers as part of a future research agenda including: the need for a processual imaginary; experimentation with temporal perspectives and orientations and explicating the temporal affordances of our methods.
Representing slow violence and resistance: On hiding and seeing
- Cahill C.
Slow and fast violence: A feminist critique of binaries
- Christian J.