Kanisha D. Bond, Milli Lake, and Sarah E. Parkinson offer four lessons from conflict research for the “Covid-19 and the Social Sciences” series. Based on their own extensive backgrounds conducting fieldwork in insecure places, the authors outline several points for researchers newly grappling with pandemic-induced insecurity: that crisis heightens conditions of vulnerability and inequality, that fieldwork is perpetually fraught, that researchers must demonstrate restraint, and that empathy is key. Keeping these lessons in mind, they argue, will help researchers to center the concerns of those at the margins and produce research that is both methodologically and ethically sound.
Kanisha D. Bond
Kanisha D. Bond is an assistant professor of political science at Binghamton University. Her research engages quantitative and qualitative methods to study how gender, race, and ideology influence mobilization and institution-building among radical sociopolitical groups around the world, with a particular focus on North America, Latin America, and Africa. Her scholarship has been published or is forthcoming in the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Politics, the British Journal of Political Science, International Negotiation, Qualitative and Mixed Methods Research, and the newsletter of the Comparative Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. Her work on culture and political mobilization can also be found in Foreign Policy and the Washington Post's Monkey Cage blog, as well as through the Urban Institute in Washington, DC. Bond earned her PhD in political science from Penn State University in 2010 and serves as a program co-convener of the Advancing Research on Conflict (ARC) Consortium. Find her on Twitter @_kanishabond_.