Researching development planning during pandemics: ethics, methods and impacts

The third event of the ‘(Post)Pandemic Planning in the South(s)’ seminar series reflects on how knowledge co-production in research has continued in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, yet in quite different circumstances.

We will explore the ethical challenges and dilemmas of conducting remote research during the last two years. While researching remotely might provide substantial advantages that could be maintained further beyond the pandemic, it also poses epistemological and ethical challenges that demand greater reflection. For researchers and practitioners, the pandemic has hastened experimentation with remote methodologies (such as audio-visual methods); however, these methods many times have taken place without critical consideration on how these methodologies might exacerbate extractive approaches.

Our work during the pandemic has forced us to redefine ‘participation’ in remote participatory research, and to ask ourselves how much and what kind of participation is ethical and empowering under such circumstances.

During the discussion, we would like to highlight issues around the tensions between product and process, the consideration of technical aspects, and the difference between research action and reflection stages, among others. Furthermore, we would like to discuss gendered-related issues, and the varying expectations of multiple research stakeholders.

Regarding collaboration with research participants and partners, we should consider how to support communities to devise strategies for self-representation, and how to enact co-production remotely. We will discuss Global North/Global South collaboration while critically exploring research as a dynamic site of power relations and hierarchies. We aim to discuss how current research can support communities and whether knowledge co-production, and ‘doing together’ are possible in our (post)Covid era.

Speakers

Dr Rita Lambert is an Associate Professor at the DPU-UCL where she co-leads the MSc in Environment and Sustainable Development. Trained as an urban development planner and architect with over 19 years of international experience, her research, postgraduate teaching and consultancy are closely linked and span across various countries (mainly Latin America and Africa). Her work focuses on environmental justice, urban risk, just energy transition, dignified housing, mapping and participatory methodologies. She undertakes action-research, training and capacity building working closely with communities, NGOs, local and national governments, and local researchers, to co-produce strategies towards environmentally just urbanisation.

Dr Emmanuel Osuteye is an environmental and social development researcher based at The Bartlett Development Planning Unit, University College London. His research interests focuses on studying the governance, policy and institutional aspects of risk and disaster management in low-income urban centres; informality, urban resilience and poverty reduction; participatory processes for community capacity building; as well as the counter-hegemonic activity of indigenous African movements and grassroots processes to influence policy.

Emmanuel has significant in-country research experience in a number of African countries including Ghana, Benin, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Malawi, Uganda and The Gambia working closely with community groups, researchers, higher education institutions, and various levels of decision-makers to explore innovate ways of collaborative learning about urbanization and sustainable development processes.

Dr Sonja Marzi is a Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science in the Departments of Methodology and International Development and she is an Affiliated Academic at the Latin America and Caribbean Centre. Sonja’s research is interdisciplinary and focuses on gendered urban challenges and inequalities in Colombia; cutting across the fields of Geography, International Development and Sociology. Her research draws on feminist, anti-racist and post-colonial theories and aims to push the boundaries of collaboration and participatory research designs under remote conditions, focusing on (re) conceptualising gendered urban challenges in Colombia. Building on cutting-edge methods of using audio-visual digital methods (e.g., film and video) to co-produce knowledge, her work centres the voices of displaced women in Medellin and Bogota and contributes to new understandings about their relationship to urban space in violence-affected areas and women’s negotiation of their urban futures. In recognition of her work, Sonja’s research has been funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), UK; The Fritz-Thyssen Foundation, Germany; and by an LSE Knowledge Exchange and Impact fund, UK.

Chaired by

Prof Camillo Boano: Professor of Urban Design and Critical Theory at The Bartlett Development Planning Unit, UCL

About the (Post)Pandemic Planning in the South(s) series

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought new imperatives for the field of Development Planning. As a response, last year DPU proposed a webinar and blog series around ‘Post COVID-19 Urban Futures' as an outward facing space for reflection with scholars, practitioners, students, and alumni on the impacts the pandemic is having on the cities in all spheres of life. The question we used to connect all the sessions and written contributions revolved around: Are we ready to imagine a better post COVID world?  

Find out more on the series webpage.