Larissa Schindler: "Im/mobilities and their research methods"

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Speaker 1: On the go sprint lectures on African mobilities, podcast by Africa Multiple.

Speaker 1: It's a pleasure for me to do the moderation of today's topic even though I'm not into that topic that much because Joelle also already mentioned that I am a climatologist and part of the mobilities section who what everybody in the room probably knows. It's an honor to introduce Larissa Schindler who just joined the University of Bayreuth last year in summer. So welcome to Bayreuth from our side. And in Bayreuth she has the professorship which is called—I don't know the English denomination, I just have the German CV here—but it's methods of empirical social research. Probably it's a bit different officially, but this is what she is doing. Empirical means in her case not necessarily quantitative but qualitative research. And this is where she's coming from. And the last project she was running as a DFG project at the University of Mainz was a topic which is on a totally different context probably now because it was on air travel and increased mobility in a nutshell. So now it's probably decreased mobility and the impact. And it just ended after the pandemic started. Before she had often normal CV moving from university to university. She did her dissertation in Mainz where she was a research assistant for a few years. After she was a research assistant in Munich at LMU. She was back at the LMU as a substitute professor. So she was there for almost a year. Then went back to Mainz. Then had a professorship on sports sociology in Hamburg. Then the DFG project was her probably own position. And then luckily we could convince her to come to Bayreuth and she joined our section. So the floor is yours.

Speaker 2: Well, thank you very much. I'm really happy to be in Bayreuth because it's yeah it's a really nice place in fact although actually the pandemic doesn't let me really come there physically. However, it's a really nice university and I'm really happy to be here. And I'm also really happy to have the opportunity to speak here. I wanted to start with a small anecdote of my life. Ten years ago I traveled Mexico together with my sister and there I found the bus system that really surprised me because there are first, second and third class buses. The first class buses are I'd say more comfortable than I am used from Europe. The second class buses are more or less like I know them from Europe. But the third class buses are rather different in their ways. Actually we once wanted to use the third class bus at a special site. But both of us were talking Spanish and it took us twelve people to ask until we found the space where the third class bus goes from because everybody told us hey you're a tourist go by taxi there are public taxis for it. But for some reason we didn't want to use it. And then we asked how do we get the tickets and they told us just go there and you'll get it. And actually when we were there we found out why because it wasn't a bus in the way I am used to but it was a kind of truck where you just sat on the platform behind. This might not be very surprising to most people here since you are studying Africa so I guess you have a lot of information about different ways of traveling. However, since then whenever I was studying mobilities I thought that actual the current mobilities research is really very much influenced by European forms of travel. So I'm really happy also to be in Bayreuth because of your research network because I think that it really makes a good impact to mobilities research. Actually since I have not systematically studied in any way mobilities outside Europe well apart from being a tourist there or from getting some interview but not really in a systematical way, I was really wondering what I could talk about here because I thought like you have very much more information about different ways of traveling than I have. However, I thought maybe I could make some input about the pandemic situation also thanks a lot to Paddy for his talk I think three weeks ago or so because it always already took up a lot of moments that I could also connect to.

Speaker 1: So actually what I was thinking to talk about was the topic of researching during a pandemic because that really changes the situation, I'd say, for mobilities research. Just as a background which everybody knows is that mobilities research has suggested a range of possibilities to mobilize social research that concerns not only the physical travel of course of researchers, but also of methods and the idea of following objects. And they also pointed on the possibilities of digitalities in this respect. A second, for me really important point is that mobilities research has very clearly also asked to consider not only mobilities but also immobilities. I am very much thinking about Mimi Sheller's work on uneven mobilities. So the relation between mobilities and immobilities seems to be a very crucial point in my view. But now what are the consequences of the pandemic to this research approach? And actually quite clearly there are two difficulties that arise. One is the restriction of mobilities that we are faced with. And second is the extension of social distances which in many ways of empirical research or at least in qualitative empirical research is a key factor. So I'm thinking about participant observation or also most kind of qualitative interviews are conducted in a situation of co-presence which means a physical co-presence of researcher and researched people. One thing about Paddy's talk really struck me when he said, or when you said since you're here, that you were going to the next roadblock because actually more or less that's the distances we are doing at the moment. So I would not say that participant observation is totally cancelled, but it is restricted in many ways. Since the pandemic, I was surprised to see really a huge quantity of publications about the COVID situation, also in the social sciences and humanities. I found one contribution by Hidalgo and Khan very intriguing who made more or less two suggestions. One was the idea of blindside ethnography that comes a bit from Hidalgo's research in Latin America and she was writing in that paper that she had to be flown out of the country in the middle of the ethnography, but then started to research the social media of that community and saw that their specific life also came up, that she came into contact with families she would not have been in contact before, that she made friendship with people she would not have met before. So the idea she proposes is that if you have been somewhere maybe social media can in a way help to keep on your research even if you are not there, with the idea that not always we physically see or we not always have to physically see to understand social processes there. And the second point the authors make comes more I think from Khan who was very much pointing on exceptional moments and saying that there is also before the pandemic there were topics to be researched you cannot really participate in like sexual harassment or so, and that you can use maybe the methods people use who are in these research areas where you cannot really conduct participant observation. So these were two suggestions I found helpful in a methodological way. What I found somehow interesting about it is that I have the feeling that in a way digital methods may gain more importance than they had before. Like quite easily we can, it's not the best choice always, but we can make conduct interviews with Zoom or with other tools like it. But also maybe the research on social media might gain more importance as Hidalgo and Khan have proposed it and also other researchers like Postill. So I guess in this situation these methods may gain more importance, but maybe I thought it might be also worth to consider other types of data which are...

Speaker 1: by now sparsely used but might in this situation have a good impact in the way that can propose. So I thought I would just introduce a little bit into into the project I conducted on air travel, which has actually finished in June twenty twenty. So it was more or less hit by the pandemic, but of course I had already collected all the data, so I was only publishing. And now I do have the problem in the publications that the situation has severely changed. But yet the data I had was already collected in that study. So it was an ethnographic study actually on air travel, which mostly focused on the embodiment of technically augmented mobility. So what I was thinking about is to bring two strains of research a little bit more together. On the one hand, the sociology of the body, and on the other hand discussions about materialities and sociology of technologies, actor network theory and these kinds of strands, in a way to understand better how the materiality of the social can be studied and can be understood. What I mostly used was as an ethnographer participant observations and interviews. But they both of them although they are the typical methods of ethnography, have some limitations as far as you were in an airplane. And I found that a rather sparsely used type of data was very helpful, which I would call logbooks. Logbooks have historically arisen in navigation in the late sixteenth century. And it's a kind of diary you could say that mostly were led on the boats, on the vessels, to make sure that they were following the guidelines they had from the people who hired them, so that the boat more or less went the right direction and they were in the right lead. In humanities, the term is broadly used, actually quite often, and I find that really right, is it used as data close to diaries. In many contributions they are discussed as a type of diary and of course there are high similarities to diaries. There are differences in the topics that are used. So logbooks often report on routes, on passages or on work processes. And formally they are often only led in one entry while a diary consists in many entries over at least a part of your life course. We can distinguish two types of logbooks. One are pre-existing logbooks. Felix German, for example, had made an important contribution on the logbooks from nineteenth-century whalers off the coasts of Africa. And there is another very nice, I think, study by Terence Ann Anderson on skippers in South Africa. But in fact these studies used pre-existing logbooks, so logbooks that were actually more or less written in different ways of navigation. And also like in diary research, there is a second type, which are solicited logbooks, which apparently are used when there are no pre-existing logbooks to get. So you would ask people to write logbooks and that was actually what I did. I asked people to write about their experiences in air travel, ideally during the travel or just few time later. Logbooks are clearly close to diaries, but they also have in this way some similarities with interviews and with participant observation. Like interviews, they are solicited logbooks or invited stories. That means they would not have been written if there was no researcher to ask for it. And yet they are a form of self-documentation that is relatively remote from researchers' influences because actually you're not in the same situation and making questions. Thus they have some similarities to participant observation as well because they have some similarities to field notes, but there are much more people who are writing on them.

Speaker 1: You have a kind of maybe a crowd ethnography or so people many people who are writing on part of that ethnography. So to make it a little bit more understandable I brought two fragments, two excerpts of logbooks. There is one who was written by a sociologist in her late twenties. She wrote, I get calmer since now nothing can really go wrong anymore. I take out my notepads and start putting down some ideas for the logbook. I noted that this task is making me more aware of the environment. And I found above all the last sentence very intriguing because it really brought me on the idea that it comes close to ethnographies that writing because this is also something we experience in ethnography that we get more aware of social processes around and above all when you're using an airplane you know that you got getting in remote mode quite often. So and what but was what we also find in in this book is some kind of she's reflecting a day flight and this was actually something that I really often found in interviews most people in interviews told me about their experiences more or less in day flights. And what I was and this is the second the second entry I want to present. What I find intriguing about logbooks is that actually the topic of night flights came up because people are much closer to the situation they were in. So they also wrote about night flights and sleep and hunger and these classical problems that arise when you're in the plane and you have no control about these parts anymore. So she writes, I am hungry. Lunch was not big. Flight attendants come by every ten minutes I feel with little snacks which does not solve my problem. Finally my tiredness outweighs everything else. There are three hours left. Time enough to seriously try to sleep. I blow up my neck pillow, get out my sleeping mask and put in earplugs. Equipped with these I managed to fall into some sort of sleep like semi-consciousness for about nineteen ninety minutes. At some point even this is not possible anymore. My problems with sitting in these seats return accompanied by boredom. So actually what I found really nice in this entry was at one point like the topics she brought up like hunger, like sleep, like problems with the seats which seldomly came up in interviews. All the references to kind of corporeal problems more or less or embodied problems in the flight. So to come to a conclusion since time is running, I would conclude to say that logbooks are useful in several ways. One as I have already suggested is you have many different portrayals and conditions of flight. And they are much more than interviews focused on on the practices on the situations of flying. But of course they also have limitations and the clear limitation is that they are based on the capacity and willingness to write. So when I was when I was getting through my the logbooks I had collected clearly most of the people who had written were social scientists. So there are clearly this method in my view cannot or well would have been a very specific topic. But in general I would say it's a kind of data that mostly works in combination with other kinds of data. But actually I find that always a very good way. So in a way to come to an end, as I have said I think within that covid situation we can maybe detect a kind of approximation of research on physical travel and on digitalities in mobility studies at least as Uri and others proposed it both of them were considered. However I feel that most research clearly makes a distinction between physical travel and digitalities. But then also as I've said I think that there is broad range of data that was that is now sparsely used that could be helpful and may come to the fore in that situation of a pandemic. And actually I was thinking about logbooks because they really have like you could have many people going until the next roadblock and writing down their experiences and then you would also have a kind of differentiated picture about the situation.

Speaker 2: Thank you for the presentation. And now the floor is open for questions.

Speaker 1: There are two possibilities. We are not too many people, so I would suggest that we are straight doing it uh without using the chat, but placing the questions to uh Mr Schindler directly. Stefan, please.

Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you for this interesting talk. Um, I'm a geographer, an economic geographer. So my question would relate to um the point where you said digital methods are useful for researching mobility dynamics, patterns, et cetera. But there's a caveat there. They're often used in a highly selective manner, et cetera, et cetera. Could you elaborate on the potential of these methods and the limits a little bit more?

Speaker 3: Sure. Um, I was actually well, there is a discussion on digital methods which mostly asks if social media can in any way replace an ethnography in the sense of participant observation. And I think there are two crucial points in that discussion. One is, in some situations you have no other remedy. So either you research on social media or you don't have a chance to research at all. But the second, I find more important, is that social media are getting much more important within our lives. So quite often social media are part of the social processes. And this makes it somehow clear to me that it is often overseen. This is a point that Ida Higo also makes in her contribution, but you can also find it in Postill's texts or so, that she, for the pandemic situation, she came to research a part of the community she was interested in that she would not have researched otherwise because you can actually either, well, of course you can combine, but in one situation you can either be in social media or outside. And since as ethnographers we are always interested in the situation, we tend to prefer the actual situations. But much of the social processes that are important might also be just taking place in social media. And I do think that with the pandemic it got more importance, but it also had it before. So maybe the pandemic is also a point that makes us consider it more and that maybe also after the pandemic, which I hope is happening at some point, we shall keep that in consideration, that social media are also an important part of life.

Speaker 1: Because I have a direct follow-up, I will now use my power as a convener to ask before Franka Otto and then Martin Diewenbeck. Because you just said either-or. So social media or, is there another possibility to combine these data? And do you already have an experience on that?

Speaker 3: Actually, I would not say, I wanted to say that in some moment you can do either one or the other because at some moment you can either participate in social media or in some gathering or so. But within the research process, of course, you could do both and it might be more important like in digitalities ten years ago, the difference between online and offline was so important, but nowadays we hardly can use it anymore because apart from the passenger cabin of an airplane, there are hardly any spaces where we are offline in fact. So I do think both of them is important. But just as an experience from my research, and I had three years of research, I found it difficult to do both because actually I had planned it, but then time ran out with participant observation and interviews and logbooks and you know, you're collecting data and you also want to analyze it and you want to make publications. And then I really, so I think within a research design it has to be really well planned, but I think that would be crucial points in coming up studies to consider.

Speaker 1: Then Franka Otto first and then Martin.

Speaker 4: Yeah, thank you very much. Very interesting analysis. But yet, I have a little bit of misgiving. As an ethnographer, don't you think that oftentimes when we deploy technological devices, you know, in the study of mobility, we tend to lose out on the non-material aspect of culture? How, for instance, will you be able to capture religious practices, you know, issues about beliefs? These you can only do if you find yourself being a participant observer.

Speaker 1: So I don't know what you have to say about that. Thank you.

Speaker 2: Well, thank you very much. Actually, yeah, I think the combination is both because actually you're totally right. I would not give up participant observation. It is in a way the preferred method you can use. I would just combine it more also with social media although not all places in the world are concerned with social media like a post still in that contribution also argued that friend of his was or colleague of his, I think, was trying to research Afghanistan and actually there were no social media, at least at that time, that people used. So what he did, he was researching together with research allies who were there, but he couldn't get into the country. So it's in no way I wanted to say that in every research you have to use both. In no way I wanted to say that participant observation is like from yesterday, we don't need it anymore, but I do think still that participant observation is the core of an ethnography and whenever you can do it, you should do it. However, I think that maybe thinking about social media within the research design would be also important in, of course, in those spaces where it is, you know.

Speaker 3: Okay, Martin Duesenbeck next and then Grace Akec.

Speaker 4: Thank you, Alissa. I just want to add that digital methods, if you talk about data, for example, I think we should also have a look on quantitative data at the moment. For example, currently we are doing a test study on the impact of COVID nineteen on mobility and immobilization in the ECOWAS region in West Africa which is quite large, but I mean we're looking on public transport, aviation, shipping, cargo, migration, but also everyday mobility patterns of individuals and we are discovering now the bulk of data that is available, but it's very painful to get this data. Often you have to pay for it and also to evaluate it, especially I'm also more qualitative oriented and but I think it's very important, especially at the moment, to get an overview what is mobilized and what is immobile. But my question is, Alissa, how do you think will these new attitudes towards mobility and the new practices of immobilization that we are experiencing now and that I think we will continue to experience during the pandemic, how will this change research questions of mobility studies?

Speaker 2: Mhm. I mean, to the first point, yeah, I mean, I think that one of the huge things about ethnography is that it is meant as a pluralist method design. So there is no way of excluding quantitative data from ethnographies. It might be more complicated, I think, but it should be part of it. And what I really find good about the professorship I have now is that it is called empirical methods. So in my view has a quantitative and a qualitative part and should be both of it. The research questions, yeah, that's really a good question actually. I mean, it's always difficult to look into future, right? But I do think that the whole situation will have an impact on the time on the next years also because the pandemic is in a way theoretically also connected to questions of sustainability. So I think people will not return to fly as much as they did and I do think that the possibilities of digital meetings will stay. So I do think that the whole kind of way of mobilities and immobilities will change. So also actually the questions will change. I mean, I always find it difficult to look into future. I do think that it's very important to see what is really the impact about it and what is going to keep. So because I neither think that people are going to stay at home as they do now. I think at the moment we can travel again, we will do so.

Speaker 1: But, um, so yeah, I think the climate change does not have, you know, will not be stopped by by the pandemic. But I don't know if substantially questions really are going to change. I mean, what I do think is going to change is that maybe really we have to think physical travel much more connected to to digitalities. Not, but this, I mean, that also happened before because, I mean, you knew, you use digitalities to book, to book your your train travel or whatever. So, I mean, digitalities was always present in mobilities research also if you're interested in physical travel. But maybe it gains more importance and really there is a further approximation of these two topics. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Okay, thank you. Grace Akezi please, Grace.

Speaker 3: Hi. I'm wondering if you can speak a bit about some of the ethical considerations that come up especially with some of these methods. And here I am thinking for instance with the logbook for instance, were there issues, ethical concerns around air travel, especially during the beginning of the pandemic where people were perhaps facing anxieties with travel? Did you experience some of these and did that raise any ethical considerations about the data itself or the method that you used?

Speaker 1: I felt that ethical considerations, especially in that type of data of the logbooks, you know, were kind of easy because you can anonymize them easily. You just have to change the names and nobody will find any clues to the person. And that also, there were hardly any texts that were really difficult in, I mean, their personal preferences or so. But ethically, I found that data in a way unproblematic, less than interviews and less than participant observation. What I was thinking about actually was an alternative that was interviewing while I am on board. Because you're you're in the plane, you know, you have plenty of time if you're at least in a in a middle hall. But I felt that was really ethically problematic because on the one hand people told me, yeah, but it's wonderful because people cannot escape the situation. But actually that's the ethical problem, you know, if somebody is my seat neighbor and I ask them and all the typical ways of avoiding an interview like saying, well, today I can't, but in two weeks maybe, and then you postpone again, which is, you know, like a very polite way of saying I don't want to be interviewed, in fact. They are not possible in the airplane because you're here and now. And then also it might be, I mean, it might be difficult for me to stay with a person the next five hours of the flight who told me not, but it might be even more difficult for the person I have asked. And then I also felt like it's a very random choice of asking people who are just sitting next to me. But in fact, I sometimes found it found it really pity because I was talking sometimes, it doesn't often, but you know, like one or two times within I think forty five travels or so I was participating in, I had situations where I would have liked to interview people in a way and then felt you cannot really do it. You can you can talk to people and then try to remember, but get out your mobile phone and say, I would like to make formal interview, I would like, you know, like to record what you were saying. I found that ethically really difficult. And then of course taking photos, making videos and all of that visual data is is difficult. And but that was really also a point I thought about digitalities because there are a lot of people who just upload up their records from flights and I really had planned to analyze them and just didn't have the time for it. That that was mostly the point that I felt that the combination of both was very complicated or time consuming.

Speaker 2: Any any further comments or questions for Larissa Schindler? Jochen, please, Jochen Lingelbach.

Speaker 4: Hi. Um, yeah, thank you very much for this super interesting talk. I'm a historian, so that's absolutely not my methods. But yeah, I was struck by if there's a similarity between the selectiveness of the logbooks because as I understood, it's mainly people who are used to writing and who write workbooks and who have the time to write. So during air flight, that's perfectly fitting. And then the same gap that comes up with people participate in social media, especially if you look globally, it's like it's a certain part of the population.

Speaker 1: And also it's the way I think some people use social media is also like a logbook. So I was wondering if it's a digital logbook or there are also methods about this. That was more of a comment, not a question.

Speaker 2: Yeah, but you're totally right. I mean, actually we are in a way copying some historical methods when we use historical logbooks or diaries because I think this is more kind of data that you also use. But yeah, actually I do think that every method has its limitation. There is no—not even participant observation because obviously you are not within digitalities in that. I think the big advance of ethnographies is that you are always asking which type of data do I use and how do I combine what are the advantages and what are the limitations of one type of data and they are always. And also just already because not all people around the globe do use the same practices. I have a really wonderful logbook about a journalist who took a flight to South Africa but had a stop within an Addis Ababa and he's really in a very nice way describing that that airport in Addis Ababa doesn't have the visual guidance system we are used to but they were just you know like calling out next flight to and then they didn't say Johannesburg but Joburg and he just had to follow the people calling Joburg, Joburg because that was the way to find the next plane. So I do think that you know every method has its limitations because but then again with these limitations you also find interesting points about it because often at the point where you you are in the limitations there are interesting social phenomena and then you have to look for another method to get closer. But I think that in the combination of different methods you have a good way of finding out.

Speaker 3: From my side also a comment on in this direction. So because we have a professor now junior professor on data management, data analysis and he's working on social media analysis as well partly. And Therese Reyes who is just recording here today will probably do a master thesis using social media and online interviews in combination for her thesis supervised by Mirko Schönfeld and myself on environmental issues in South Africa. So but this is yeah difficult challenging and especially using the social media information as a kind of a logbook thing would be very challenging.

Speaker 2: Yeah. And then I mean social media also has the difficulty that they are changing so fastly because ten years ago social media meant something totally different to today. So I also feel when you're reading I mean even if you're reading methodology texts that are ten years old or so quite often they are really out of time because they are too much concentrated on the actual situation. And there but there are also contributions who are ten years old and you think okay that matches today as well. But yeah I think that's a really challenging and interesting topic.

Speaker 4: There is a comment by Paddy.

Speaker 5: Thank you. It's very interesting and I was also thinking very hard about how to incorporate immobile methods and trying to think around data that you could collect maybe using social media and the rest. But it also brings me to this critical way of thinking that don't you you have the impression that with time if we concentrate on looking at for example what COVID nineteen has exposed us to that with time it is only going to be people who are able to move that are going to be able to conduct mobilities research. And being able to move means negotiating power dynamics in order to be able to access a certain field. You have to go through certain procedures which for example the COVID nineteen has exposed us to. And that would also mean only respondents who are able to access social media in case you decide to digitize the methods will be able to be part of your research group. Then what happens to the other category? That's why I think okay with time I'm imagining mobilities research will be some sort of project for class power and...

Speaker 1: And the elite who are able to take aeroplanes and go far. Yeah, that was just my story.

Speaker 2: No, I'd say you're totally right. It's just, it meets the topic, you know, of limitations of every research project. I think you have to be aware what you're doing. And it doesn't mean you should not research elites' practices because they are also part of the life. You just have to know that these are elite practices. And if you don't, if you're not able to conduct participant observation and instead of you conduct a study on the social media, you have to be aware that there is a certain group of people on social media and others are not. However, as Hidalgo has written in her, when in that really nice contribution together with Khan, I felt that you're also getting to other people than you would have met in the participant observation. Because, you know, also if you conduct a participant observation, you don't meet everybody. There are always people you're not meeting. And quite often, these are also in some way people who are better off. They might not be the local elites, but there might be people, you know, that who are more open to researchers. There might be people who speak the language if you are not able to speak the local language. If you're not very good integrated into the community you're researching in, you might just meet those people who come towards strangers. And there might be other people living in parts of the city or you will just never come to. And that was a nice point about Hidalgo who said that she really made contacts to people who lived in parts of the town she was living at, she would not ever gone ever. But of course, it's no solution to that problem. In social media, you meet other people than you would meet in a participant observation. So I would not replace it just for fun saying it's only enough if you go to social media. But I would consider to integrate social media into a research project that is mainly based on participant observation as long as I can do it. And it's more a kind of plaidoyer for using very different kinds of data than a plaidoyer for just going into social media.

Speaker 3: Okay. So thank you very much for today's presentation, Larissa, and thank you for the nice discussion. And hope to see you again. Bye-bye.

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Narrator: This was On the Go: Sprint Lectures on African Mobilities.

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