Contributing to the “Covid-19 and the Social Sciences” essay series, Oscar Abedi, Maria Eriksson Baaz, David Mwambari, Swati Parashar, Anju Oseema Maria Toppo, and James Vincent outline various paths toward reducing field research’s potential for exploitation, especially that of Global South collaborators. The pandemic has highlighted inequalities and immobility that differently affect facilitating researchers and contracting researchers. In response, the authors identify key issues that institutions, publishers, and individual researchers must reflect on in order to counteract these imbalances—and take advantage of an opportunity to fundamentally transform field research into collaborative knowledge production.
Swati Parashar
Swati Parashar is director of the Gothenburg Centre for Globalization and Development (GCGD) and associate professor in peace and development at the School of Global Studies, Gothenburg University, Sweden. She is the author of Women and Militant Wars: The Politics of Injury (Routledge, 2014); coeditor (with Ann Tickner and Jacqui True) of Revisiting Gendered States: Feminist Imaginings of the State in International Relations (Oxford University Press, 2018); and coeditor (with Jane Parpart) of Rethinking Silence, Voice and Agency in Contested Gendered Terrains (Routledge, 2019). She is an associate editor of Critical Studies on Security and serves on the advisory boards of International Feminist Journal of Politics, Critical Terrorism Studies, and Millennium: Journal of International Studies. She is a coeditor in two book series, “Creative Interventions in Global Politics” (Rowman and Littlefield) and “Gender, Sexuality and Global Politics” (Bristol University Press).