Resonant Research in Uncertain Times: Reflections on Relational Research Practices During a Pandemic

Abstract

This paper reflects on how one interdisciplinary research team restructured a simulation-based study involving actor-portrayed counselling sessions with social work students and practitioners in response to the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the needs of participants and team members to repair fractured connections to themselves and others. We read our experiences alongside Harmut Rosa’s work on Resonance and the concept of Slow Scholarship to explore how our team balanced the pressures of academia in the pandemic and the needs of participants and researchers. Conducted in the context of social work education, the study involved transitioning from in-person to online methods while centering care, containment, and collaboration among team members and participants. We detail three core practices—dedicated containment of research tasks, paid time for relationship-building, and paid reflexive debriefing—that allowed us to attend to the human dimensions of the research process. Using a collaborative feminist reflexivity approach, we argue that ethical and rigorous research must include compensation for the unseen labor of trust-building and critical analysis, particularly during periods of social crisis. This reflection contributes to broader calls for research as a form of relational repair, offering a model for resonant engagement within the neoliberal academy.

Keywords

qualitative research methods relational ethics resonance slow scholarship social work

Introduction

The SIM Social Work Research Lab at Carleton University was set to begin an in-person simulation study in which research participants engaged in multiple simulated counselling sessions with standardized clients (paid actors) at Carleton University at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in Spring 2020. The pandemic fully disrupted normal academic activities as conferences, in-person field work, and meetings between collaborators were put on hold. All the while the expectations within higher education continued despite lockdowns and public health measures. This had a massive impact on early career academics and marginalized scholars as normal care duties increased alongside the ongoing demands of academia (Naqvi & Russell, 2020; Rutter et al., 2023). The pandemic had the effect of amplifying the contemporary fracturing of relational connections within the university and contemporary society as a whole.

At the Sim Lab, the pandemic was a time of intense anxiety both within the research team and for study participants who were social work students and practicing social workers. Our struggles were not unique, feminist scholars across a wide variety of fields grappled with the new ethical challenges that the pandemic wrought including but not limited to the impact of online engagement on researcher-participant relationships (Howlett, 2022; Newman et al., 2021), the heightened risks faced by vulnerable communities (Pherali et al., 2025; Webber-Ritchey et al., 2021), considerations for the multiple vulnerabilities of both researchers and participants during the pandemic (Meijering et al., 2024), and heightened epistemic injustice (Mkhize, 2023). At the same time, several studies have highlighted the “unique advantages” in the change to virtual methods including the proliferation of innovative and creative research methods (Keen et al., 2022, p. 1; Rahman et al., 2021). In their study of social researchers’ approach to research ethics during COVID-19, Surmiak and colleagues wrote that the “pandemic presented an opportunity and a threat” to ethical research practices (Surmiak et al., 2022, p. 213). For our team, addressing what we experienced as the heightened stress of the pandemic context required a fundamental methodological restructuring of the project moving from in-person to online data collection and addressing the personal and professional anxieties that came with this decision. The Sim Lab team of students, early-career academics, and established scholars was forced to re-orient our research practices to ensure we met our project goals and supported team members and participants in this midst of global uncertainty.

In this piece, we reflect on the research practices we adopted over the course of the pandemic and offer our experiences of working amid uncertainty. In particular, we explore how the forced restructuring of our project can be understood in relation to recent works on slow scholarship. Slow scholarship refers to a kind of academic approach that prioritizes thoughtful, deliberate research, collaboration, and reflection over fast-paced demands of heightened productivity and rushed publication, aiming to foster deeper insight, relationships, well-being, and meaningful engagement within scholarly work and among peers (Mountz et al., 2015). Slow scholarship has been critiqued for its emphasis on speed rather than the power structures that necessitate such speed (Martell, 2014; Ulmer, 2017). As Martell writes, “slow is about more than slow. It’s about power, inequality, conflicting interests and seeking autonomy, more than speed itself” (Martell, 2014). In response, Ulmer calls for a “slow ontology” where researchers are encouraged to “differently productive” rather than “not productive” working towards the goal of a “long-term, collective endeavor that fosters healthy, sustainable, productive, balanced, meaningful, and Slower—if not Slow—approaches to inquiry” (Ulmer, 2017, p. 208). This could mean, for example, rather than rushing to produce quick results, prioritizing having regular dialogues, meetings, and reflective sessions to collectively shape the research questions, methods, and data analysis which allows time for trust, mutual learning, and meaningful academic inquiry. While we see challenges with the deceleration element of slow scholarship particularly in navigating institutional pressures for productivity and quick outcomes, we identified areas of alignment with the notion of ensuring resonance (Rosa, 2018) in our research practices. We understand slow scholarship as a collective action that transforms working conditions across the academy by “supporting – and facilitating, where possible – slowness among our students and tenured, untenured, and contingent colleagues” (Mountz et al., 2015, p. 1249). For our team, “slowing down” is not a step away from research, but rather a digging into research. We see it as the closest we can find to a methodological application of Hartmut Rosa’s work, which highlights the contemporary late capitalist problem of acceleration which he defines as a growth in quantity per unit of time (2019, p. 1). Rosa suggests that the answer to this problem is not deceleration, but resonance. Acceleration, according to Rosa, is happening because modernity can only stabilize dynamically since it must forever expand, grow, and innovate (Rosa, 2018, p. 1). He sees this process as creating three interwoven dysfunctions: a crisis of democracy, a crisis of the environment, and a psychological crisis. All three emerge from acceleration’s disturbances in our relationships to nature, the social world, and ourselves (Rosa, 2018, p. 22019, p. 52019, p. 11). Given this, Rosa asks what distinguishes successful and unsuccessful relationships in the world (2019, p. 5). He challenges the tendency (particularly in research) towards “expanding one’s reach” and “mastering the world” (2019, p. 11), instead arguing that we focus on encounters of “genuine sympathy and concern, and the ability to both touch and be touched” (Rosa, 2018, p. 11). In the research context, this a de-emphasis on creating products for product-sake and seeking mastery or perfection in research practices, but rather focusing on the ability to build meaningful and authentic relationships. This means attending to and valuing what others often do not, including the time and labor required to enact ethical research methods premised on relationship building, dismantling power dynamics, and building trust, all of which are fundamental elements of slow scholarship (Mountz et al., 2015).

In this piece, we offer our experience adopting three practices (containment, paid time for relationships, debriefing, and reflexivity) that aimed for resonant and ethical research practice. By bringing together our shared experiences of conducting research that “counts what others don’t” (Mountz et al., 2015, p. 1250), including care labor, trust building, and time spent in collaborative reflexive analysis, we aim to join the growing number of voices advocating for a transformation of the research process that allows researchers to “dig in” and invest the time and energy needed for ethical research practices (Miner, 2017).

Study Background

This article describes the experiences of a research team conducting a multi-year simulation-based research study during the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada. The study initially aimed to include three participant types (social work students, recent graduates, and experienced social work practitioners) that engaged with three different in-person simulated client sessions.

Prior to the start of data collection, the study was disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the team made the decision to switch from in-person methods to an online format. The redesigned project involved social work graduate students (n = 12), recent graduates (n = 10), and experienced social work practitioners (n = 12) each engaging in the first 30 minutes of two simulated online counselling sessions, using two distinct standardized clients enacted by paid actors: “Myia” and “Dave.” After each simulated counselling session, participants took part in a 30-to-45-min interview with a research team member to discuss and reflect on their experiences.

The core research team consisted of six members: the primary investigator, Sarah Todd, who is a full professor and department head at Carleton University, an associate professor who received tenure during the study, a PhD candidate (research manager), Katherine Occhiuto, who graduated and was hired into a tenure-track position during the study, a post-doctoral fellow (research consultant), Sarah Tarshis, who started a tenure-track position during the study, and a master’s student (research assistant), Ruxandra Gheorghe, who began her PhD during the study. Finally, a research assistant, Lindy Van Vliet, joined the team after the data collection was completed to assist with dissemination.

Methods

We engaged in a practice of “collaborative feminist reflexivity” to produce this piece (Linabary et al., 2021, p. 719). Collaborative feminist reflexivity is grounded in feminist research ethics, integrates reflexivity in the research practice both formally and informally, and emphasizes critically interrogating the “co-constructedness of the research process” (Linabary et al., 2021, p. 726). Throughout the study, team members documented our experiences doing the research and took notes on the team interactions, our responses, and important highlights of the research process. Regularly scheduled team meetings created opportunities to reflect on the work and adjust any aspects that did not best serve participants or team members (e.g., pacing of the data collection). At the end of the data collection and analysis phase of the study, team members met to dissect the research process and hear from each other on our experiences of the study.

For this paper, the research assistant Lindy (Li) took the lead on analysis. She began by compiling various reflection pieces (team member notes, transcript of the meeting on research processes) and identifying key patterns using reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2022) informed by feminist theories of care in qualitative research (Bergum & Dossetor, 2005; Caretta & Faria, 2020; K. Jackson, 2021). Lindy (Li) then spoke with Katherine (KO) who suggested creating an online reflection document to allow team members to share our thoughts and respond to each other’s ideas and recollections. Lindy generated key themes by reading this document alongside the other reflection pieces and then refined the themes through the writing process. The themes were further nuanced through 4 rounds of edits by the team. The quotes from team members in the later parts of this paper come from the reflection team meeting and the shared reflection document.

Transformation of Working Conditions: Containment, Relationships, and Reflexive Debriefing

As public health lockdowns and social anxiety rose, there was a palpable sense of something being shifted and ultimately broken, in how each team member viewed who they were in relation to the others, and in their connections with the broader world. As universities shifted online, the pandemic acted as a catalyst for this team to re-visit the research processes that were in place and reflect on how to make the project work for everyone. We adopted three key practices which allowed us to continue the work despite the pandemic disruption. First, the team established a working structure that contained the work and built trust between members. Second, the team set aside paid time for fostering relationships with each other and the participants. Finally, the team prioritized paid time for debriefing and reflexivity during the coding and analysis stage, allowing for a deeper engagement with the data.

Containing the Research and Resisting the Academic Leak

Oftentimes research projects end up requiring researchers to dedicate unpaid time as the works leak out beyond the time and funding bounds of the original proposal; this was especially true in the pandemic. For team members, the pandemic was a time of great uncertainty and intensification of duties both at work and within our personal lives. The daunting task of completing a multi-year research study added an additional layer of stress and tension, and it quickly became clear that the team had to adopt a research structure that recognized each others’ other stressors and enabled the team to rely on each other. First, the team created a schedule to contain the work. As Katherine Occhiuto explains:

We contained data collection to Fridays, and this made the relational and supportive pieces easier to do, because it was contained and patterned. So, it was not one of us alone collecting data from home hesitating to reach out to a colleague if we had questions or wanted to debrief, or someone else feeling bad about not wanting to take a call because they are at the dinner table with their family, or out for a walk, etc. It meant as a team, we could be there for each other in the ways we value and wanted to be [KO].

This process of containment transformed how the work was done allowing team members to honor our responsibilities outside of the project. While research projects can often end up leaking into researchers’ lives (Acker and Armenti 2004; McKenzie, 2022; Rafnsdóttir and Heijstra 2013), containing the research to a specific day allowed the research team to push against this leakage and enabled team members to show up more fully during dedicated work periods.

Over-working in academia is a highly gendered phenomenon, as previous studies show that women and people who are marginalized on the basis of gender cope with academic hypercompetitiveness by “working more and sleeping less” (Acker & Armenti, 2004, p. 3). Support from resonant “close relations” is one of the key ways that marginalized academics resist and manage these pressures (McKenzie, 2022, p. 262). Containing the research to a specific time and day helped the research team in this study offer that support to each other through regular meetings and debriefing sessions. Containing our data collection to one day per week also meant that the entire day was dedicated to (often) back-to-back interviews. It was not easy, and we often felt exhausted by the end of the day. Our debriefs, then, meant that we were also doing a bit more support work for each other to account for this fatigue that came out of containment. This dedicated time together is an often-unrecognized labor that had many positive benefits including allowing the team to share the labor and encourage each other through hard times. As Sarah Tarshis writes:

We connected deeply and relied heavily on one another. We shared the professional burdens of scheduling, conflicts, stressors related to the projects, the professional gains of sharing the opportunity to do these interviews/getting lots of great practice and exposure to this methodology etc. We also shared the personal burdens, caregiving, exhaustion, stress of the job/academia and celebrated the personal gains, family, engagements, hobbies, and things that brought us joy [STa].

These scheduled regular debriefing sessions not only fostered inter-team support but also resulted in better scholarship and ethical research practices as the team had the opportunity to adjust practices based on participant or team member needs. In their piece on failure and research, Harrowell and colleagues argue for the importance of responsive research methods. They write that researchers should “use failure proactively as a resource to improve research practice and outcomes” (Harrowell et al., 2018, p. 231). In this team, regular debriefing sessions allowed the team to notice “failures” where the process was no longer working and come together regularly and early to adjust the process using these as opportunities to make ethical research decisions.

Prioritizing Time and Funding to Build Relationship with Participants

As team members adjusted our work schedules to account for the shifting demands of the pandemic, participants faced serious upheavals of their own. To accommodate both the needs of the research team members and of potential participants, the choice was made to redesign the project from an in-person simulation study to an online one—meaning instead of research participants engaging in simulated in-person counselling sessions, they engaged in simulated online counselling sessions. This came with a lot of uncertainty, particularly around how to develop and maintain relationships with participants without the opportunity for in-person one-on-one time. To address this concern, our team focused both financial resources and time on relationship building. Ruxi Gheorghe, a research assistant at the time, was paid to call each participant to screen for participant eligibility, discuss their role in the study, and answer any questions or worries. As Sarah Tarshis notes, the team took the time to prioritize the research relationships and focus on quality over quantity. This meant changing the research design to allow for more in-depth discussions with participants by removing one of the simulations from the study. This decision was intentionally made to enable for better data collection that did not overly exhaust participants who were also living the realities of the COVID-19 pandemic.

While this was a large qualitative study, that involved participants engaging in multiple simulated counselling sessions, which is a very intensive, time consuming, resource heavy method, we didn’t cut corners, we were intentional with every bit of the decision-making process. We focused on quality, not quantity (even though there were a lot of participants) [STa].

The choice to prioritize time for meaningful connections with participants was not only deliberately made to ease pandemic restrictions but also a choice made through trial and error. This study initially began as a pre-pandemic pilot project, and the pilot stage offered important lessons on ensuring there was time to be present with participants and fellow team members. As Katherine described:

I learned a lot around project design from the pilot, and the importance of building in time to develop relationships with our research participants (especially given the nature of the project), and with each other. In the pilot, I was very over scheduled. I had to work hard to be present with participants, and to slow my brain and body to do so. For this larger project, I really wanted to slow us down to create the conditions for us to be present with ourselves, with research participants, and with each other [Ko].

Slowing down did not necessarily mean a change in the pace of the research. Instead, it involved transforming the working conditions in ways that were productive and prioritized paid time for the often-invisible labor of fostering relationships. As Sarah Tarshis described,

We took it slow: When I say slow, I do not mean it was slow in terms of the data collection, it was actually very impressive how fast we collected the data. But we were slow in that we didn’t rush the important parts, answering the questions of potential participants, the vetting process, checking-in with each other, debriefing before and after the interviews, we didn’t rush these very important relational ethics processes [STa].

Both the research team and participants felt more comfortable engaging in this research due to the work we put in to building rapport. Engaging in observed simulated counselling sessions can be daunting for some participants, and time spent building relationships and providing reassurance helped ease them into the simulations. It was our impression that this resulted in a more genuine simulation experiences and richer data than we had collected in projects that used less relational-based approaches. Time spent building resonant relationships, including paid time to do the often-undervalued work of connection with participants and debriefing with each other, had a fundamental impact on the data collection process, allowing for more nuanced data. This did require moving funds around in the project so that some of the funding that had been initially budgeted for travel and dissemination was, for better or worse, reallocated to data collection so that process could move more slowly.

Debriefing and Reflexivity in Coding and Analysis

Coding is a multi-step process in most qualitative research. First, team members familiarize themselves with the data, next classifying it into various groupings, before interpreting the data and generating codes based on identified patterns (Braun & Clarke, 2023; S. F. Jackson, 2008). The temptation to skim through this step can result in missed connections and surface-level analysis. In this project, the team worked hard to ensure a rigorous and collaborative coding process oriented on a belief that fostering resonance between team members will generate nuanced codes. Katherine and Ruxi described how this process unfolded and the resulting depth.

The entire research team read the reflective post-simulation interview transcripts for three participants. We then met to discuss what we were seeing. Subsequently, we read an additional three transcripts and met a second time to discuss. Five of the six team members then individually created draft codebooks based on the preliminary coding of the transcripts we had all read. We then met to discuss our codebooks, after which I merged the codes and definitions, distributed the merged codebook to the team for review, and made revisions based on their feedback (KO).

After the collaborative coding book was developed, Sarah, Katherine and I had “Coding Parties” where we met online to code together, allowing us to ask questions as they come up, and problem solve together, and also allowing for relationship building during an otherwise isolating period. Being grounded in a collaborative relational feminist ethics allowed our coding to be more rigorous [RG].

Essential to the coding process is trust building within the team to allow for disagreements and enable in-depth discussions about how each researchers’ experiences and theoretical orientation allowed them to see different things in the data. Sometimes that involved making compromises around coding decisions or setting egos aside to be able to truly listen to each other. As Ruxi described, this had an overarching benefit for the research.

It also felt like it wasn't echo chamber-y. And I thought that was really helpful that we did have disagreements or different interpretations of how to code, because it really, for me at least, helped me think about different ways of interpreting the data that I would not have thought of otherwise. So I really think it benefited the research [RG].

Both paid time and trust between team members enabled healthy dialogue and conflict around data interpretation. This meant that all team members felt comfortable sharing our perspectives but also enabled space for deeper data analysis (Silverio et al., 2022). As Sarah Tarshis described it at our reflective team meeting “With many eyes on the data lots of rich insight and perspectives emerged” [STA].

This deep and multi-faceted engagement with the data is in line with best practices in qualitative and collaborative research, which emphasize the importance of taking time to generate complex and nuanced themes from the data (Braun & Clarke, 2022). In this project, the research leads ensured there was paid time set aside to debrief after engaging with data to allow for discussions around the nuanced meaning researchers were generating. As Katherine discussed in the team reflection meeting,

We consistently engaged in and prioritized debriefing, recognizing that these were part of our paid responsibilities. Unlike in some other projects where debriefing was more informal to troubleshoot, or avoid feeling isolated, in this project debriefing was a prioritized and valued part of our paid employment [KO].

The importance of paid time to debrief and engage with the data allowed team members to “buy in” to the process and the result was a deeper engagement with the data. It also resulted in a sense of pride at the credibility of the insights the team developed. As Sarah Tarshis shared, the labor resulted in a credible result:

And these processes really strengthened our results in our outputs. We can confidently assert the credibility, dependability, and overall trustworthiness of our findings. In our hearts, we know we took the time to do the work: we memo’ed, debriefed, and reflected. We didn’t rush through these processes; we created space to disagree and to work together effectively. We put our words into action, and it feels good to have worked in a way that so closely aligns with our values [STA].

Discussion

Ethical social work research methods require an investment of both time and labor from researchers. Hours are spent building relationships with participants and with fellow team members, reflecting on the research process, adjusting it, and ensuring findings are thoughtfully disseminated. A growing number of scholars have articulated these research practices as a form of “slow scholarship.” Slow scholarship is a research approach that prioritizes close reading of data, recognizes the time and labor dedicated to relationships and mentorships, and actively confronts neoliberal hyper-competitiveness (Caretta & Faria, 2020; Mountz et al., 2015; Olivieri & Alverde, 2024). For us, slow scholarship is a way of building resonance into our research, or in other words, opportunities for research to transform from an exercise of expanding our knowledge of the external world apart from us as researchers, to one in which we focus on how to build research processes that allow both researchers and participants to move and be moved by one another. This was especially important during the COVID pandemic when the transition to online engagement changed the relationship-building process between participants and researchers (Tremblay et al., 2021). In their discussion of slow scholarship as an example of resistance praxis, Wahab, Mehrotra, and Meyers describe how slow scholarship was not simply a matter of adjusting the pace of the project but rather about making “room for thinking, creativity, and useful knowledge” (Wahab et al., 2022, p. 1). We argue that such spaces allow for connections between researchers and participants that create resonance which deepens our relationship to the world in a way that broadens possibilities for more humane and nuanced research within the neoliberal structuring of our work and lives within academia. In this way, we are aspiring towards Ulmer’s Slow Ontology, as a way of being (rather than knowing), focused on our relationships to ourselves, others, and the world as a “slower way of scholarly being” (Ulmer, 2017, p. 202).

Leibowitz and Bozalek identified several main elements of slow scholarship (Leibowitz & Bozalek, 2018, p. 983). For the purposes of this article, we focus on how our research orientation towards resonance aligned with three of these elements: transformation and reprioritization of how time is spent, relational ontology, and deep engagement with research process and data.

First, despite the moniker, slow scholarship is not simply a matter of reducing the pace of a research process or attempting to make more time within a neoliberal university. Rather, it is about cultivating working conditions that enable a transformation and reprioritization of how time is spent (Mountz et al., 2015), allowing research to move “at the pace of trust in the integrity of our ideas” (Wahab et al., 2022, p. 6). Re-imagining time also means “counting what others don’t” in our conceptualizations of time and building in space to do the hard work of ethical research, such as time spent building relationships with participants or changing the approach to research to better honor participant and team members’ time (Mountz et al., 2015, p. 1250). It is about recognizing the value of and pushing for “attentiveness, deliberation, thoughtfulness, open-ended inquiry, a receptive attitude, care-fullness, creativity, intensity, discernment, cultivating pleasure, and creating dialogues” (Leibowitz & Bozalek, 2018, p. 984); in other words, it involves building resonance of “receptive and active connection” (Rosa, 2018). Throughout this process, our team focused on “counting what others don’t” (Mountz et al., 2015, p. 1250). This meant ensuring that team members were compensated for the labors of connection that are required in feminist research practices (i.e., relationship building, reflexivity, coding, and team meetings) but often rendered invisible. This means that grants also need to include adequate time for deep collaborative data analysis that may extend beyond expected timelines.

Second, slow scholarship is built on a relational ontology that recognizes that subjects come to be within particular social structures and power relationships (Leibowitz & Bozalek, 2018; Wahab et al., 2022). This means engaging in critical reflection on the power dynamics within research relationships and time spent cultivating relationships of care. Relationships of care cannot be built without a fundamental recognition of how power operates and flows in research settings and without a recognition of the aliveness of the Other (Rosa, 2018, p. 4). In this project, that meant recognizing the personal responsibilities other team members had and finding ways to support each other through uncertain times. Slow scholarship builds on feminist research practices through a continued recognition of the time and labor required to engage in ethically interrogated relationship building within the team and with participants (see also, Van Vliet et al., 2025). Containing the research was an effort to work within the limits of each team member’s ability despite the fact that these changes were not smooth but came with interpersonal tensions and concerns about meeting project deadlines. We recognized, and continue to recognize, that our researcher-subjectivities were informed by our social realities outside of academia and our positionalities within it. This means that the “who we are” as researchers is always uncertain, in a process of (un)becoming that is supported and facilitated through a relational approach to research. Containing the research and paid time for relationship building were made possible through directing funding towards the often-unseen labor of the research process (Adams & Holman Jones, 2011; Etherington, 2007; Grossman et al., 1999; Linabary et al., 2021; Mountz et al., 2003; Owton & Allen-Collinson, 2014). This was especially important for early career team members who were balancing multiple roles and the financial pressures of graduate studies, all within a global pandemic.

Finally, slow scholarship emphasizes time spent in deep engagement with the research process and research data. Slow scholarship recognizes the importance of “dwelling with, waiting or sitting/staying, steeping ourselves in things by re/turning, re/visiting, re/engaging, re/reading, re/writing and contemplating [anew]” (Leibowitz & Bozalek, 2018, p. 984). These practices of re/turning, re/visiting, and re/engaging improve the reliability of the study and produce more in-depth and richer analysis, yet the productivity demands of academia often make it difficult to engage in deep research practices as researchers are juggling competing deadlines and strict output requirements. Key to the process of re/visiting and re/engaging is the importance of “owning one’s perspective” and detailing how the researchers’ positioning impacted their analytical process and the generation of themes. Rosa (2018, p. 4) argues that resonance “involves [an] encounter with some real ‘other’” that is outside of our control and therefore it is impossible to assume it will always be moments of harmony. Rather, he argues that resonance “requires difference and sometimes opposition and contradiction in order to enable real encounter.” Slow scholarship emphasizes the time and labor required to build relationships where there is enough trust to allow for the difference, contradiction, and opposition required for resonant encounters and for deep engagement with data.

In this project, time was spent fostering team relationships that valued difference and opposition in the coding process to generate more nuanced codes and deeper analysis. Some of the SIM Lab’s outputs (see, e.g., Occhiuto et al., 2024; Tarshis et al., 2025) relied on an adapted version of Braun and Clarke’s reflexive thematic analysis (RTA). RTA, much like slow scholarship, emphasizes the importance of “revisiting,” “rereading,” and “dwelling on” data to generate nuanced themes (Braun & Clarke, 2023; Leibowitz & Bozalek, 2018, p. 984). Braun and Clarke articulate reflexive thematic analysis as a labor-heavy process that produces rich data through in-depth engagement, creative and reflexive thinking about the data, and intensive coding processes designed to interrogate the multiple ways data can be interpreted (2023, p. 3). Our research processes created the conditions necessary for the deep level of engagement required for RTA. Reflecting on our investment in creating these resonant conditions for in-depth collaborative analysis, we recognized that this approach ultimately resulted in rigorous and in-depth analyses, which led to high-quality research.

Trustworthy qualitative research requires an investment of time and energy in order to ensure it is conducted in ways that are systematic and “auditable” (Darawsheh, 2014; Nowell et al., 2017, p. 4). Compensating team members for the time required to engage in critical reflexivity, including time spent building team relationships that valued difference, supported the project’s rigor. As Nowell and colleagues (2017) argue, “reflexivity is central to the audit trail” as a “self-critical account the research process” will allow others to “clearly follow the decision trail” and understand the rationale behind specific research decisions (p. 3). In team-based research this type of reflexivity is especially important in order to track, understand, and explore how meaning is co-constructed not only between researchers and participants but also between team members themselves (Linabary et al., 2021). Reflexivity being ingrained in the research process made it possible to plot the impact on data and to collect more useful data, generate more nuanced themes, and identify patterns that were not always evident because each team member brought a different perspective.

These elements of slow scholarship allow for us to attend to the quality of relationships in research as being as important as the output and reach of the research in line with our orientation towards resonance in research. Thereby our research practices become one mechanism to repair our broken relationship to the world, not just in terms of what we research, but how we navigate the relationships that constitute the research process in such a way that makes resonance, or the ability to touch and be touched by each other possible.

Conclusion

The COVID-19 pandemic was a major disruption to most research studies, and our team was forced to fundamentally restructure the project to ensure ethical and credible study results. Academic expectations did not reduce during this time of uncertainty and heightened anxiety and, in many ways, the demands on researchers increased. To address this tension, our team adopted research practices that oriented towards Rosa’s (2018) concept of resonance and, upon later reflection, aspired to Ulmer’s (2017) ideas of a Slow Ontology in which we were trying to find a slower way of being with ourselves and each other. This meant reorganizing the work process to contain the research and dedicating time for relationship building and team-based reflexive analysis. This transformation was not smooth; the team struggled with intensifying pressures around continuing to work in the middle of a global pandemic, differences around comfort level with in-person work, and anxieties about the future of the project. Yet, the result of this transformation was improved working relationships within the team and with participants and more time dedicated to a deep analysis of data leading to stronger research outputs.

Slow scholarship offers an opportunity to push against the aggressive demands of academia that pressure scholars to engage in processes that are antithetical to ethical and engaged research. Our team values many of the contributions of slow scholarship, including the emphasis on transforming working conditions and valuing the unseen labor of feminist research (reflexivity, team building, relationship fostering). We believe there are many affinities between slow scholarship and Rosa’s concept of resonance which he proposes as the “other” to the alienation produced by late capitalism’s constant push for productivity and outputs. In this piece we read our pandemic research practices alongside slow scholarship and the concept of resonance, highlighting the opportunities each offers for shaping research practices. Our research process was full of unknowns and mistakes. The story we tell here is not one that provides a research road map. Much of the time, we were working to be responsive in-the-moment. When we reflect on what was different about this project, it largely comes down to how we “felt” in relationship to each other, in relation to our participants, and in relation to the work itself. It allowed for an opening up of an opportunity for connection at a moment in time when connection was fractured. Such openings will look different in every project, but for us, it meant digging into research and counting things that provided an opportunity for research that resonated with the values that motivated us to become researchers in the first place.

The pandemic had the effect of disrupting normal practices for everyone. In doing so, it made visible many temporal, geographic, and relational elements of our lives and work that had been obscured by their omnipresence and familiarity. This opening can, if we allow it, expand our imagination of future research practices that might reprioritize how we are in relationship with ourselves and each other with research processes. These are highly situated kinds of changes, but we see that the revaluing of, and explicit attention to, relationships and time cultivated feelings of connection between researchers and participants that strengthen the experience and meaningfulness of scholarly research. How one does so will vary, but considering time and relationships in research design and funding may be one way in which research might provide opportunities for resonance in a (dis)connected world.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada; Grant No: 435-2020-0273.

ORCID iDs

Lindy Van Vliet

Sarah Todd

Ruxandra M Gheorghe

Author Biographies

Lindy Van Vliet is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Social Work at Carleton University (2025 -2027). Her current research explores the intersections of community care, stigma, and grief for sex working communities in the middle of the drug poisoning crisis in Canada using community-based research methods.

Sarah Todd, MSW EdD is a full professor in the School of Social Work and Director of Arthur Kroeger College at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Her current research interests are social work education and uncertainty in clinical practice.

Katherine Occhiuto, MSW, RSW, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at Carleton University’s School of Social Work and Co-Director of the SIM Social Work Research Lab. Her research focuses on how to make systems and services work better for people, including the use of simulation for more effective and ethical social work practice.

Sarah Tarshis, MSW, PhD, RSW, is an Assistant Professor of Social Work at McGill University School of Social Work. Her research focuses on intimate partner violence (IPV), access to services, and trauma-informed practice. She is also interested in the use of simulation for teaching and research in social work education. Her research is informed by her professional experience in IPV and community-based organizations in Canada and the U.S.

Ruxandra M Gheorghe, MA, MSW, is a social worker and doctoral candidate at Carleton University's School of Social Work in Canada. Her current research is concerned with articulations of toxic masculinity in direct therapeutic practice.

Pam Grassau is an Associate Professor and Associate Director in the School of Social Work at Carleton University. Her research draws on community-based, participatory methods, with a focus on health equity, access, and inclusion in working with individuals, families, and communities experiencing advanced illness, end-of-life care, caregiving, and grief and loss.

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