Most of our research team meetings are online. Given the practicalities of travel and our other commitments, this project would be impossible without online meetings. Through the medium of cyberspace, we have jointly analysed data, discussed ideas, made plans for data collection, and revised journal articles. If we can do all of this virtually and if meeting in-person risks increasing the spread of Covid, why did we decide to meet in-person? In this post Heather Mendick reflects on how research benefits from researchers being in the same physical space together.
In November 2021, we had our first in-person project team meeting in over two years, spending a week working together in Gothenburg. Until well into October, Sweden had a ban on most UK visitors due to the pandemic so we didn’t know until a few weeks before the planned meeting whether it would be possible for all four of us to be in the same city. Even without the restrictions, it was a difficult decision to meet up, balancing the risks against the benefits. I feel that there are two things we got out of meeting in person that are qualitatively different to what we’ve managed to achieve online: building trust and understanding within the research team and making connections across the project.
Building trust and understanding within the research team
My enjoyable research collaborations seem to also be the ones that generate new ideas. They rely on finding people with whom I broadly share a way of looking at the world. This doesn’t mean I don’t want a team who will open up new theories and challenge some of my assumptions. It means that I don’t want to be arguing about how we come to know about our world or whether gender equity is a good thing.
These collaborations also rely on finding people with whom I have similar ways of working. I never want to repeat the experience of being part of a project led by someone who prefers to stay up late frantically writing on the night before a deadline rather than planning in advance and building in time for things to go wrong.
I think that these successful collaborations also rely on something less tangible, which is the understandings and friendships that exist within the research team. In our Geek Equity online meetings and via our WhatsApp group, we have shared information about our lives beyond our collaborative research. But this cannot compare to what is possible in a week of in-person meetings where we can eat, play video games, watch a film, have a beer, and walk and chat together. As well as being a joy in and of itself after so much time spent in social isolation, stronger relationships produce better research.
Making connections across the project
There is a fluidity in meeting in-person that we haven’t managed to recreate online. Two or three people can talk without excluding the rest of the team, the Swedish speakers can move into Swedish for a few minutes, and when you can see people’s body language, it’s easier to judge when it’s okay to interrupt, when we need to take a break, and so on.
We have found it easier to jump from one idea to another when we’re sitting around a table together. In Gothenburg, I could work at a computer alongside Maria and Andreas developing English translations of their Swedish interview data, something critical to doing the fine-grained analysis we feel is needed to track the gendered and racialised exclusions in talk about technology. We could also use the white board to map out one of our datasets. Of course, there’s online whiteboards but they lack the familiarity of the physical version so we’ve never used them.
Finally, the process is different. Rather than charging up the computer, getting a cup of tea or coffee and strolling from the kitchen to the living room, you have to collect everything you need for the day and travel to the meeting. You arrive at the meeting in a different psychological state. We can work together for longer in-person than online. When we’ve had Zoom Geek Weeks, we’ve built in multiple breaks to avoid screen fatigue. This combination of physical preparedness and the longer time spent working together, generates more ideas.
Online vs offline
I struggled to write this post. It feels obvious to all four of us in the Geek Equity team that meeting for a week in Gothenburg was qualitatively different from meeting for a week online. But it’s hard to explain why. I imagine that investigating this elusive difference will be the subject of many research studies for decades to come.
Meetings on Zoom undoubtedly have many benefits. There’s lots of bad meetings that would be less painful via Zoom and we’ve found it works well for research interviews. As well as the practicalities, being online can reduce the anxiety associated with meeting in person. It allows us to be comfier and if you need a break from being visible, you can turn off the cameras.
For this project, the online meetings have been more critical. Even without Covid, we would only have been able to manage a week of in-person meetings each year. Online mechanisms including Zoom, google docs, WhatsApp, social media and this website are what make our collaboration possible. But despite this, we really hope that we’ll be able to meet in-person again in London in 2022.
