In this event co-hosted by the EUI QUALIFIE Working Group and the International Relations Working Group, PhD researcher Inés Bolaños Somoano will draw on her own experience conducting remote fieldwork with EU policy makers and European security practitioners to lead a hands-on session on the implications and practicalities inherent to conducting remote fieldwork, and particularly semi-structured online interviews.
Qualitative methods in the social sciences have been undergoing a process of hybridization between in-person and remote investigations, a process only exacerbated with the outbreak of the Covid-19 Pandemic. While remote practices are not new to the fields of politics and sociology, they remain a grey zone of EU studies' methodology and, broadly, those employing interviews with international elites and policymakers. Drawing on a recently published article, Ines will speak of her own experience turning an initial, precarious back-up measure for interrupted in-person work, into a productive and self-sustaining approach to fieldwork. The session will cover both pragmatic challenges and ethical considerations, and part of the session will also be dedicated to discussing the translation from data to text, and particularly the use of quotes in the writing up process. To this purpose, examples from a second article utilizing remote fieldwork materials will be provided.
Speaker Bio:
Inés Bolaños Somoano is a PhD candidate on EU Counter-terrorism at the Political and Social Sciences Department of the European University Institute (Italy), and a Visiting Researcher at the Institute for Security and Global Affairs, Leiden University (Netherlands). Her research looks primarily at the emergence of Prevention of Radicalization as a distinct policy field in Europe. Her secondary focus is on Islamophobia, right-wing online extremism and policy guidelines to combat online radicalization. Inés is a qualitative researcher, using elite interviews, remote and in person, as well as archival evidence, text and policy analysis.