Analysing Change

19 November 2020


Bucerius Fellow Adam Baczko and Gilles Dorronsoro on the dangers of subcontracting research and remote methodologies in the context of Covid-19: “The Ethical, Epistemological, and Conceptual Need to Resume Fieldwork”

“Too often reduced to a ´collection´ of data, and therefore possible to be outsourced without too many safeguards to companies, or even to students, fieldwork is actually a decisive moment in theoretical questioning. In particular, the sequence - hypothesis/conceptualization, data collection, analysis, publication - describes very poor social science research. In fact, the investigation itself is an essential moment in conceptualization and obligates, especially in crisis contexts, a more reactive modality of theoretical elaboration, with a continual interaction between hypotheses and data production.” more