So, you work on this research project that you have been planning for years. A project that you have dreamt about. You managed to get funding for it. You feel your research team is a very dedicated one. You are in an academic heaven for some time. And then, of course, a pandemic has to strike.
As Covid-19 changes our lives, we also need to adjust our working schemes, switch to online meetings and video conferencing, adjust our research methodology, our data collection method, especially for the second and third phase of the research project, modify laboratory surveys into online ones, rearrange publications, conferences, almost everything. Not easy.
But then again, after a Skype meeting yesterday in which we spent more than three hours discussing operational definitions of variables for coding, and among them the concept and representation of ‘structural violence’, in the form of inequalities and injustice stemming from structures, laws, institutions (portrayals of immigrants having limited access to health services, education and the asylum procedure or in the form of illegal push-backs in the sea as a state practice) I thought it was more than cute that my 6-year-old daughter, Daphne, asked me after the call, ‘Mom, can I ask you something? What is structural violence, mom?’.
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