COVID-19 and Social Science Research— Beyond Disruption and Digital Divide,a Digital Turn

The Disruption and Its Impact

Contrary to hopes, the pandemic resulted in an intensification of the worst social tendencies of our times. Social scientists were eager to capture this once-in-a century phenomenon and the disruptions created by it, and the research about the impact of COVID-19 on various phenomena and spheres proliferated. Many journals and periodicals called for and brought out COVID-19 special issues.

In India, the migrant crisis in the first lockdown in April 2020 triggered a close scrutiny of public policy response to the pandemic and its socio-economic impact. Public health, food security, labour rights, livelihoods and agriculture were some of the themes around which the debates were most intense. Another issue that received the express attention of scholars was increased violence. NGOs working on relief and advocacy reported and recorded increasing incidents of domestic violence, and other forms of gendered and sexual violence. Rights advocacy organisations also documented violence, spurred by caste and communal prejudices, custodial violence by state actors and vigilante violence in the shadows of the pandemic restrictions. There was also some literature on various media panics around the COVID-19 pandemic and hate campaigns stigmatising ethnic and religious minorities as carriers of the virus. The impact of the pandemic lockdowns on education of children and higher education was written about, as was the psychological impact of the pandemic lockdowns.

Much of this research was spurred by activist-scholars who were involved in relief and advocacy efforts who conducted rapid research. Social scientists also wrote as experts taking a quick stock of the situation while the more academic research, if it could take place at all, took time to publish. Much of this writing depended on secondary sources such as civil society research and fact-finding reports, media reports or data from public institutions and sources.

When universities were first locked down in March 2020 there was a lot of scepticism about using online modes for teaching and research. The concern about the digital divide was all too real and genuine. As the pandemic progressed physical restrictions were eased in other spheres of activities, but the universities remain closed. While many scholars continue to be left behind, many who initially did not have (quality) access to the internet were able to get online through personal struggles and sometimes with civil society support. This is important to note because there were inordinate delays in releasing scholarships on which the disadvantaged students depend the most and there has been a complete absence of any outlays on digitalisation of higher education by the UGC. This was somewhat in contrast with well-endowed elite institutions offering technical or professional education such as the IITs and National Law Universities making efforts to ease the transition for students. There was a disciplinary bias too. Science students were allowed access to their labs and other campus facilities intermittently, but not much care went into looking at the exact issues that impeded the work of social science scholars and addressing those concerns.

The health status of researchers or their family members and care responsibilities also limited their ability to access their field. For many researchers, especially students pursuing MPhil and PhD research who had to return to their family homes, the rising costs of travel, no scholarships and dipping family incomes impeded travelling for research, even when distances were short and otherwise not inaccessible. Newspapers carried stories of precariously employed and underemployed social science ad hoc or guest faculty who were pushed into unemployment and were unable to find decent jobs. Secluded in family homes and no access to university campuses meant for many scholars, a loss of academic and intellectual community in which their work was fostered free from the limitations of personal backgrounds. The authoritarian tendencies put scholars and activist-scholars at risk of imprisonment and intimidation by police. Many scholars and intellectuals were arrested which created an atmosphere full of stress and anxiety for others. Along with the class position of scholars, all of these experiences were acutely skewed along identitarian lines of gender, caste, and religion and ethnicity.

In addition to the travel bans, the pandemic caused physical inaccessibility of custodial institutions such as prisons, mental hospitals and juvenile care homes. Beyond these issues, the access to fields is a complex issue. Some fields, like courts for legal anthropologists, were digitalised and transformed completely such that research ‘as usual’ was not possible.

Virtualisation of Social Science Education and Research

These disruptions in research, inevitably, forced innovations. Digital technology for online interactions and various other research tasks already existed, but was not used as much. This had to do with reservations about online interactions not being as effective as in-person interactions. These concerns are not invalid as we confront the reports of ‘Zoom fatigue’. While the impact and efficacy of digital modes of interaction is already a subject of business research, the implications of using face-to-face online interactions to conduct social science research needs more explorations and experience sharing rather than assertions coloured by fear of the unfamiliar.

In the initial period of the pandemic lockdown, students report, teachers tried to be more considerate and more innovative about assessment and research supervision. Undergrad students were encouraged to undertake research in their assignments or take up internships which entailed some form of online research in lieu of fieldwork training or educational excursion in disciplines where this formed a component of training. Students also report using more digital audio and visual material as sources. By the time the second and devastating wave hit India, the novelty of video calls and meeting platforms had worn off. Scholars found a way to work around some of the problems earlier considered insurmountable. This helped them lower their scepticism regarding online interactions, focussing instead on how to remove the remaining impediments. This also meant that teachers reverted to their earlier and familiar modes of assessment, namely, examinations and tests.

Scholars attended seminars and presented papers in workshops which they would have otherwise not been able to attend because of the costs involved and complex process of getting official permissions, travel visas and so on. Many regional universities were able to organise seminars online in which they invited renowned scholars and philosophers, who in turn were happy to have an audience that they otherwise had little chance of reaching and interacting with because these institutions lacked funds to bring these academics to their campuses physically. Many scholars formed voluntary groups around shared interests in questions and themes around which they organised lecture series. Some of these workshops and webinars that Indian universities were organising stopped because of a circular from the Ministry of External Affairs requiring institutions and organisers to take prior permission for foreign speakers on issues that were deemed to be connected with national security. This was later withdrawn, but it produced a lasting chilling effect.

Arguably the virtualisation of work enabled a discovery, in hindsight, of how much of our lifeworld was already virtual. For example, one of their biggest problems, some activists said, at the turn of the century was that they sometimes did not know where best to protest against a multinational corporation. The spatial dispersion or virtualisation of corporations—facilitated first by telecommunication and later by digital technologies—had made their embodiment confusing. Writing in 1998, Pierre Levy (pp. 29–30) said,

Virtualization comes as a shock to the traditional narrative, incorporating temporal unity without spatial unity (by means of real-time interactions over electronic networks, live rebroadcasts, telepresence systems), continuity of action coupled with discontinuous time (answering machines and electronic mail, for example). Synchronization replaces spatial unity, interconnection is substituted for temporal unity. Yet the virtual is not imaginary. It produces effects.

Similarly, many archives housed in institutions in the global north are digital. During the pandemic they undertook special drives to publicise their holdings as well as to facilitate increased accessibility. In India, even the more important official archives are not yet fully digitised and access to them is cumbersome though not impossible. Many have online catalogues and scholars can place online requests for digitisation and access of documents. But many regional, localised and more specialised archives do not even have this level of digitisation or service and remain completely inaccessible during the pandemic lockdown. Digitisation of textual heritage and digitised archives will not only mean easy access for traditional forms of reading, but also open up the possibility of ‘distant reading’ (Moretti, 2013). The digital analysis of vast amounts of archived ‘texts’ as a form of digital ‘reading’ of the archive has enabled digital historiography (Sternfeld, 2011).

Evidencing (the Need for) a Digital Turn in Social Sciences

Acknowledging these emerging realities, research grant-making organisations seeking to support social science research may have to grapple with issues related to digital modes of research, organisation of conferences by research associations and publication or dissemination of research. A German organisation recently published a white paper titled, The Digital Turn in Sciences and Humanities (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [DFG], 2021). Although it has a limited view of requirements for a declaration of a digital turn as increased availability and use of digital tools for research, it still points to some important considerations. I reframe these here slightly in order to capture specific challenges in social sciences. Epistemic and ethical challenges that need to be overcome by social scientists to apply digital technologies for processing large volumes of data require creation of a role for digital enablers in social science research. The increased need for technical specialists and digital infrastructure for storing data and so on will have major financial implications since this technology and both the software and hardware is expensive in contrast to the usual understanding that digitisation demands only the use of free or relatively cheap technologies as online meeting platforms such as Zoom.

Some of these changes, especially the use of internet-based platforms of communication as intellectual spaces by holding webinars or online conferences, or as virtual fields/sources of data for field research, are indeed indicators of an accelerated use of digital tools in social science research. However, I argue that the pandemic has highlighted that not only are digital technologies offering new modes of interaction and of storing or accessing sources for research, but also that the nature of certain realities is now digital. I will briefly attempt to highlight a few illustrations of this less discussed aspect of the pandemic and the implications for the future of social science research to claim that we are witnessing a digital turn in the social sciences. But a digital turn cannot be declared just because digital tools of interaction and analysis are used in research.

Although numerous claims have been made for various ‘turns’ in social sciences, opinions are sharply divided on some more than the others. In my opinion, three previous claims of turns have been of great significance in social science research, namely—the linguistic turn, the spatial turn and the cultural turn. Examining these may help in evaluating my claim of a comprehensive digital turn in social sciences. A turn does not mean mere invention and adoption of new research tools, but signifies attention and acknowledgement of an aspect of social reality that has otherwise largely escaped the attention of scholars or has not been accorded as much importance. A comprehensive turn impacts not just one discipline, but several, if not all, disciplines that are said to comprise social sciences. To repeat, a turn in social sciences can be claimed not just based on the modes of doing research, but changing the very frames of thinking about a wide variety of social processes and phenomena.

Digital methods have been in use in a few disciplines such digital geography/cartography (Ash et al., 2016) or digital sociology/anthropology (Selwyn, 2019) for decades now. Technological transformation can no longer be considered a subject of research only for science policy research in social sciences and mere tools for others. Digital tools are not only means of capturing and analysing various phenomena, but are giving birth to new realities. For example, psephologists are not going to be the only political scientists who deal with big (voters’) data. With political parties depending on various digital technologies not only to know voter’s preferences, but also to influence them, political scientists can no longer conduct research as usual by depending upon the official discourse––utterances and declarations of politics or just writing about their ‘expert’ observations of traditional forms of politics in the public sphere. Digitalisation makes an appearance in local politics as the Right to the Internet and manifesto promises for free Wi-Fi (Khan & Ullah, 2020), freelance ‘political’ strategists and technocrats driving big data projects are gaining political and social ascendance. Academic research in political science needs to display a matching cognition of the digitalisation of electoral politics and the state.

Labour studies scholars and economists find themselves confronted with the gig workers’ phenomenon which can be understood as an illustration of digitalisation of informal labour through platform technologies (Zainab & Sanjay, 2021). Gig workers on platforms such as Urban Clap, Uber and Zomato represent the further push to precarity because they are engaged in extremely short gigs of work amounting to only a fraction of a working day. This discussion best exemplifies the misleading conceptual formulation of ‘digital divide’ between those who have digital devices and access to the Internet, and those who do not. Not only are gig workers online with smart phones but they also have a keener understanding of how the algorithms that run the platform ‘services’ work and to whose advantage.

Being online is no longer a simple expression of one’s class positioning as the case of gig workers shows. Nor is being offline a straightforward case of exclusion from the implication of a digitalised reality such as an electoral process. The digital world is as much part of the real world as the physical. Acknowledging this has been easier for tech scholars who have been interested in the social aspects and ethics of digitalisation. A lot of their explorations in this regard has been in the realm of privacy and surveillance concerns. Legal studies scholars too have made interventions in this regard in defence of constitutional rights. Between them there is a sharp division of opinion about proposing interventions which can be tech solutions or regulatory solutions or even be Luddite in nature. For the social sciences, the issue is to capture these transformations and explain them better. To keep pace with the fast-digitalising world this requires a paradigm shift. Interdisciplinary social science scholars, say from Media and Culture Studies, have been quick on the uptake of these matters, conducting nuanced research when compared with more conventional and less interdisciplinary spaces in social science research.

The paradigm shift required to make the digital turn will probably be more difficult for scholars who are late to understand and adapt to technological changes, if they do at all. Without making too much of a generalisation I might flag here the generational lag among scholars who have a sense of living in a ‘normal’ world before it began to be shaped so decisively by digital technologies. For the younger generation, this phygital ² world is the ‘normal’ world. For most middle-class millennials and GenZ youth disengaging from digital technologies would amount to disengaging from life itself. But disengaging from the digital world is an unreal option even for an increasing number of impoverished informal workers who by common sense are placed on the have-nots’ side of the digital divide.

A point that should be of grave concern to social scientists is the skewed digital representation of social realities: where a phenomenon is accorded less importance than the data about it. This is done with mala fide intentions—for unethical concentration of power and for profit maximisation––and raises important questions about close readings, thick descriptions and participant observation methods. There are some realities that arise out of digital mediation or transformations that will continue to be best researched using traditional methods, for example, a fallout of the exclusion of populations from the social security safety net due to the dogged insistence on e-governance, online registration for entitlements, online compliances like KYCs and linking different services with biometrics, computer-based or online assessments. But even here it will be necessary for social scientists to take the digital turn and confront the digital gap without resorting to fearful conjecture, but with a critical understanding of the digital architecture of the data collection aided by the state for further managing the affairs of the entities who wish to dominate markets.

While exclusionary and regressive tendencies have intensified so has the countervailing pushback by democratising forces. In the problems that face social sciences today as a result of the pandemic-led acceleration of digitalisation, the digital divide in accessing the internet is a major problem, but it is certainly not the full story. I have shown above that the digital divide is not a simple, linear schism. Similarly, while data is often a tool of power and oppression in the Foucauldian sense, populations did voluntarily and quite routinely provided data to the post-colonial welfare state which used it—or claimed to use it—to plan for more efficient delivery of welfare to its citizens. The recent anti-CAA-NRC-NPR movement and the current farmers’ movements are a direct response to the tendency of data harvesting and digitalisation by collusion between neoliberal market forces and an exclusionary, majoritarian state. This tendency should be re-examined in the context of data that the governments are not interested in collecting, for example, the caste census which has been a long-standing demand of the backward classes in India.

A related problem is that of transformation of the public sphere. The nature of engagement in digital spaces posing as public sphere is itself slippery and liable to manipulations. Neoliberal tendencies have already transformed media of mass communication almost entirely into an infotainment and entertainment industry and reduced the citizen to a consumer in this regard too. Now with digitalisation of telecommunication and entertainment, conversation in digital social ‘media’ platforms and consuming digital entertainment content has reduced the consumer citizen to a data point.

To say that the social, cultural, psychological and political impact of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019), enabled by the digital platform, has been remarkable would be an understatement. There is no bigger irony than the phenomenon of the digital streaming platforms designed to capitalise on the attention economy as part of popular culture and available for the consumption of subscribers of Netflix and Amazon Prime. As research prior to the pandemic shows (Khan, 2017) digital platforms like Amazon have worked out a predatory business structure which allows it—a dominant intermediary—to compete with businesses dependent on its platform even as it seemingly benefits the consumer. Similarly, the lure of unmitigated freedom to publish opinions or other content to citizens allows for platforms such as Twitter and Facebook to be confused for replicating the analogue public sphere. Their unethical use of user data shows, as does the problem of hate speech and trolling, that they are not only undermining a political climate in which true freedom can be exercised but even undermining democracy.

A digital turn in social science is called for to examine the politics of digital forms of power and oppression, but also resistance. This requires a double move of first understanding its precise nature, and then connecting this understanding back to other forms of oppression. Such a paradigmatic shift began much before the pandemic lockdowns focussed our attention to it. Still, it can be hoped that claiming a digital turn will further accelerate the shift in research frames and help make proposing an alternate digital future an agenda for social sciences.