Embracing blended research methods

The pandemic is forcing UK-based researchers to question the ease with which they can just hop on a plane and get access to schools and communities, says Dr Alison Buckler in a recent Times Higher Education (THE) article on blended research methods.

Dr Buckler, a Senior Research Fellow in International Education in the WELS School of Education, Childhood, Youth and Sport, spoke to THE reporter Ellie Bothwell in response to a recent report prepared for Springer Nature by Research Consulting on the impact of COVID-19 on university research.

Dr Buckler’s plans to run a film-making workshop in Sierra Leone in 2020 were thwarted when COVID-19 travel restrictions came into force. Looking around for alternative options, she found a local community film cooperative to run the workshop. “The pandemic is doing a lot of the legwork for us in that respect”, she comments, “in challenging how we work as researchers and who we work with and how we could do that differently.”

“One of the things I write about is how issues of power and perceptions of expertise interrelate in research and what this interrelation means for how we generate knowledge, and how people interpret the knowledge that’s been generated. Something I’m really passionate about is how researchers should use methodologies to disrupt this power and experiment with not being fully in control of the research process.”

Find out more

Read the full article on the THE website. (Please note that this article is behind a paywall and a subscription to Times Higher Education is required to access the full story.)