Researching mobility in times of immobility

Not everyone has had the privilege of time and space to think about (doing) research through the Covid-19 pandemic, particularly in the early days of pandemic lockdowns and border closures. The differentiated impacts of the pandemic on researchers (as well as other types of workers) in terms of having the “luxury” of time and (mental and physical) space formed much of the initial debate in policy and academia. As expected, the Covid-19 pandemic has become an important research focus for mobilities scholars, not least because of its immediate immobility implications, but increasingly reflecting upon what this period has told us about im/mobile social, political and economic lives. In this editorial piece, we will briefly outline some of the potential implications of the methodological limitations on research questions and findings during the pandemic and what it means to make sense of research conducted during this period, especially for excluded social groups.

Early days of lockdowns, methodological challenges and thematic arisings

The start of the pandemic coincided with a period when mobile research methodologies, such as “go along” interviews, were increasing in popularity, at least in mobilities scholarship. The emergence and subsequent growth of the “new mobility paradigm” in the early 2000s (Sheller & Urry, 2006), shed light on the role of the socio-material environment in relation to the importance of place and how place affects what people tell researchers (Evans & Jones, 2011) – that “being there” with participants offers different (but not “better”) empirical insights. Walking interviews, defined as a method to explore the self and place (Evans & Jones, 2011; Jones et al., 2008), have been used to explore experiences from the participants’ immediate environments and their reactions and attitudes towards their surroundings. The key message from this body of research was the importance of physical (co-)presence in doing interviews and the interactive nature of the conversation in relation to a specific location. Losing the interactive part from analysis during the pandemic already exemplifies the different ways of doing research that emerged through the pandemic.

For instance, prior to the second (November 2020) and third (January to March 2021) national lockdowns in the UK, one of the authors (DH) was using mobile and visual methodologies with freight drivers (driving lorries, vans and cars) to understand their everyday (mobile) working lives. Lockdowns and rules on social distancing and limits to travel to avoid exposure to the virus forced methods online with surprising results; it seemed to make recruitment easier, and allowed greater flexibility in scheduling the interviews, which book-ended the week-long photo-diary completed by the research participants. But it also meant that reviewing the photos and videos together was more technically complicated as well as being more structured and less intuitive. There was less ‘co-analysis’ than the project had initially intended and more general discussion about the methods and participants’ learnings from thinking about how to represent their day-to-day activities: how to share the mundanity of daily working life with the researcher. This meant the findings (as with the research more generally) were different rather than better or worse.

In early 2020, emergent mobility practices in cities, such as sharing, were increasingly high on the research agenda. Indeed, the first editorial in Transport Reviews at the beginning of the pandemic came from David Hensher, who discussed possible implications of the pandemic for Mobility as a Service, which entails practices, such as ridesharing, car and bike sharing and shared modes of public transport (Hensher, 2020). Sharing vehicles/mobility spaces (including buses¹) and social isolation that came with the pandemic were, obviously, not compatible. The relevance of sharing practices was, therefore, questioned when the pandemic first hit. On a personal level, too, the sudden transition to corporeal (if not mental) stillness, idleness and immobility meant many researchers stepped back and began to question the relevance of their mobility-related research questions. One of the authors (NA) was ready to start a project looking at workers serving and building cities, specifically service and construction workers on transport infrastructure projects in Turkey and South Africa, which required overseas fieldwork. However, they first needed to rethink the substance and content, starting with the research questions: How would big infrastructure projects change? How about the workers? Does the framing of the labour footprint of big infrastructure projects need rethinking?

Obviously, there are a variety of very understandable reasons for drastic changes in research methodologies used and the thematic content of the research conducted during this period of national/regional lockdowns, social distancing and so on. Indeed, it was the immobility of some juxtaposed with the ongoing and even increased mobility of others, for example, those of key workers, that made the uneven and contingent mobilities of everyday life clear as well as the rift within working lives in late capitalism. However, we do need to note the contrast between transport/mobility research employing emerging methodologies that require physical presence and interactions and what happens next. The relevance of the present research agenda and how it had to change with the concerns that emerged from the pandemic are equally important to explore. What is now worthy of exploration is to highlight how and to what extent the current literature on urban mobility and transport has been – and will continue to be – shaped by the pandemic and its legacies.

Researching-at-home, mobile days and “Doing Things Online”

As opportunities to go “into the field” drew to a halt with “stay at home” or “reside in place” orders,² scholars made use of available (often quantitative) datasets to understand changes to mobility patterns. Mobile phone data, for instance, was able to represent the importance of socioeconomic inequalities on mobility patterns in the early days of the pandemic (e.g. Lee et al., 2021). While this initial research emphasised the importance of social and economic inequalities in relation to restricted mobilities, it had clear exclusionary implications: not everyone was included in the final analysis due to a lack of trackable data. Some of these problems also mirrored the primary surveys conducted at the start of the pandemic, which were largely distributed online, or using snowball sampling techniques, with likely biases (e.g. Mogaji, 2020; Shakibaei et al., 2021). Generalisations have remained limited due to narrow sampling. The lack of in-person interaction has also limited the empirical understanding of lived experiences and micronarratives at the local level.

Simultaneously, “doing things online” became a common trend of pandemic research. Social media was full of blog posts, commentaries and eventually academic papers on how to “do” research during the pandemic, guidance on online interviews or newly emerging research methodologies (Kara & Khoo, 2020). Whatever changes were made, it had obvious implications for who could be included in the research, whether related to the pandemic or not. Our personal experience has provided us with more vivid examples of such limitations. One of the authors (NA) had to conduct research online while researching the mobility patterns of low-income populations in an urban context, which required participants to be able to read and write and have access to computers, mobile phones and internet connections. This direct exclusion of those who are illiterate or do not have access to a device with an internet connection is clearly problematic, especially when researching disadvantaged populations. Indeed, the same research project showed that the micronarratives of everyday life of the low-paid workers were so diverse that generalisations about how the economically disadvantaged moved during the pandemic needed even greater scrutiny.

In March 2020, one of the authors (DH) was about to start a UK Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF)-funded project in Kenya, which involved travel to Kisumu and Nairobi to (a) scope field sites, (b) build partnerships, and (c) gather preliminary data. Pandemic-related border closures forced a fast rethink of how to reconfigure this work to be completed largely remotely. With the need to drastically reduce research-related carbon emissions (and #flyless), this experience showed what might be possible at a distance: online meetings with potential partners, WhatsApp calls with community groups, photo sharing and video chats with in-country partners to scope sites. This research also altered the types of relationships which were built with in-field research assistants, with far greater dependence on their knowledge, insights and awareness and mutual trust required from the outset. While the project shifted in focus and size, a variety of learnings were possible, which challenged the research team – and we imagine many others in similar situations at that time – to reconsider the shape of future international research projects with potential implications for decolonising transport and mobilities scholarship as well as sustainability benefits.

Next steps, regaining mobilities: what matters versus what is feasible

There are always limitations to any type of research. The selection of research questions is also not an objective process; it is personal and political. What type of research one does and how one does it entails questions around who we are as well as who we want to be. It is, therefore, inevitable for any research to be subject to personal biases and feasibility problems, but this time it was defined by an external factor. It, therefore, needs further scrutiny to unravel any research impossibilities at the time. To what extent the feasibility of the methodologies defined by the research foci is an important consideration in exploring the broader implications of Covid-related research. Generalisations about the mobility patterns of disadvantaged populations during the pandemic can be especially misleading if the nuances between trends and the perceived drivers/motivations behind these trends cannot be explicated. There is, therefore, a clear need to consider the future implications of what was possible for research during the pandemic and how it has shaped current knowledge about urban mobility.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In many countries, including the UK, governments were dissuading people from using buses and trains where possible as they were viewed as possible hotspots of infection. At the same time, many front-line transport workers, including bus drivers, were infected in the first Covid wave, with high mortality rates.

2 We recognise the deeply problematic framing of these phrasings used by governments around the world, which have a series of implications for mobilities scholars as well as many others.