Adapt and Adjust: Doing UK-Based Ethnographic Fieldwork During the Covid-19 Pandemic.

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has required many anthropologists to do fieldwork differently: research that would otherwise have been done face-to-face has been shifted online, sometimes very quickly. When doing research with people with chronic illnesses, it is important to acknowledge both the histories of online ethnography and the way that disability studies has engaged with the internet over time. This article uses the example of my PhD fieldwork, based in Northeast England, to explore how living in an increasingly digital world may impact how medical anthropologists could, and perhaps should, do ethnography.