http://hdl.handle.net/11089/56135 2026-04-16T20:10:28Z http://hdl.handle.net/11089/56151 Ethical Processes and Dilemmas during Research with Youth on Cyber-Risk Cavanagh, Jay; Adorjan, Michael; Ricciardelli, Rosemary In this article, we reflect on the ethical processes and dilemmas we encountered in almost a decade of qualitative research with teenagers about digital technologies and cyber-risk. Our research underscores both the opportunities and challenges of teenagers’ engagements with digital technologies, including cyberbullying and image-based sexual harassment and abuse (i.e., non-consensual sexting), on popular social media platforms. Our current research explores teenagers’ experiences with cyber-risk during the COVID-19 pandemic, including managing homeschooling (due to lockdowns), online addiction, mental health challenges, and encounters with disinformation and misinformation. We discuss our experiences with focus group facilitation and one-to-one semi-structured interviews, specifically our reflections on ethical processes encountered in the field, such as fostering rapport with young participants given the significant age gaps and our lack of knowledge at times, regarding digital technologies or topics like image-based sexual abuse. We also discuss our experiences conducting research with teenagers under the new capacity to consent ethical framework, which positions children and youth as often having agency to consent to research independently from their parents or legal guardians. Here, we detail reflections on navigating a new approach and highlight some of the considerations arising from ascertaining assent and consent. Centralizing issues of developing rapport, trust, and ethical processes related to interactional dynamics during interviews, the paper provides insights and possible strategies for those conducting research with children and youth. 2025-07-31T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/11089/56152 Recording Solo: Managing Long-Distance Data Collection within Audio Diary Research with Healthcare Professionals Moretti, Veronica This paper explores the methodological and reflexive implications of using audio diaries in remote qualitative research with healthcare professionals. Drawing on a three-month study involving 18 participants who submitted audio recordings weekly, complemented by follow-up interviews, the article examines how this method enables the collection of rich, emotionally nuanced, and temporally proximate narratives. The audio diary format proved particularly effective for engaging professionals under high emotional and organizational pressure, offering a flexible and participant-led space for reflection. The study also sheds light on the challenges of sustaining participation over time, the importance of ethical responsiveness, and the role of the researcher in supporting engagement at a distance. Ultimately, the paper proposes the concept of long-distance reflexivity to describe how both participants and researchers negotiate meaning, presence, and vulnerability in fully remote research settings. 2025-07-31T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/11089/56150 Labor of Care and Contracts: A Study of Surrogacy after the Transnational Ban in India Bhardwaj, Ruby Characterized by the interplay of care and contracts, surrogacy is an exclusive form of gendered work. The paper is based on a micro-level ethnographic study exploring the lived and embodied challenges of commercial gestational surrogates in Gujarat, India, who were undertaking surrogacy work after the ban on transnational surrogacy. The experiential accounts collected through in-depth, face-to-face interviews bear the challenges, stigma, and shame involved in surrogacy work. Not only is surrogacy work devalued, deprived of dignity, and shrouded in secrecy, but it is also corrupted by contracts, complicated by alienation and relinquishment of the gestated child. Surrogates disguise their work and stay in surrogacy hostels. Poverty in India compels many women to engage in surrogacy to eke out a living and improve their living conditions. Surrogate mothers are poorly paid, deprived of health benefits and legal security, they receive only twenty percent of the total cost of the surrogacy arrangement, and are also treated as fungible and disposable. The paper adopts the ethics of care perspective to analyze surrogacy arrangements. Such a perspective is directed toward promoting a responsible and humane attitude toward commercial surrogates. It is motivated by the need to uphold the dignity of the surrogates, their legal rights, and the social recognition of their work. The application of care ethics can alleviate the neglect and oppression of surrogates. 2025-07-31T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/11089/56149 The Sociality and Liminality of Bangkok’s Cannabis Cafés Fong, Jack In June 2022, Thailand became the first country in Asia to decriminalize cannabis, only to face opposition from conservative political forces that are now attempting to pass policies that will recriminalize its recreational use. My qualitative study conducted between summer 2022 and the conclusion of 2024 examines the sociality of 45 cannabis cafés in the capital Bangkok despite these developments, enhanced by my status as having grown up in the city and speaking the Thai language and local Chinese dialects. Employing urban sociological concepts such as Ray Oldenburg’s third places and Lyn Lofland’s notion of the urban experience as characterized by interactions with strangers, I describe Bangkok’s cannabis cafés as third places that reduce the status of the stranger, and thus destress the actor in its lifeworld. These dynamics are argued to counter Bangkok’s over-stimuli and stressor-filled experiences, now challenged by policy developments that place the continuing operations of cannabis cafés in a liminal state. 2025-07-31T00:00:00Z