Paper, pen and today’s communication platforms: Remote disaster research during a pandemic

This note reflects on how measures to face the pandemic have affected how we conduct fieldwork. In my case, COVID-19 arrived just as I began my doctoral project on how mobilities are shaped in post-disaster Central Sulawesi, Indonesia, which was hit by a devastating earthquake and tsunami in September 2018. Studying the disaster and its aftermath as a focusing event (Birkland and Warnement 2014, 60), I had planned to identify pre-existing social vulnerabilities and how these relate to the articulation of power asymmetries. In order to understand how social, political, economic, environmental and cultural interactions give shape to what we call a disaster, I planned to use archival sources on population movements, policy documents on land use, and — most importantly — the classic ethnographic methods of participant-observation, interviews and focal group discussions with people affected by the disaster and the experts involved in the pre- and post-disaster landscape. The pandemic, however, has translated into an impossibility of travel and uncertainty. In this piece I share my reflections on such circumstances.