In work package 2 of Who Cares?: Reimaging Research Cultures through research with and by disabled and chronically ill academics, we are conducting interviews with academics who self-identify as disabled, ill and/or neurodivergent. Our aim is to explore people's experiences of research and how these are shaped by different research cultures - within research groups, collaborations with colleagues, school approaches, funder support, at different career stages, as well as wider university working. We have included questions about how supported and cared for participants feel and if they are able to do the research they want to do.

We have now completed the recruitment and would like to thank participants for their time and their openness in sharing their experiences with us. We are very pleased to have interviewed 21 participants and are now in the process of analysing the interviews.

While we are interested in participant’s experiences of care and support, we are also reflecting on our own ‘care-full’ practices (Brannelly and Barnes, 2023). Brannelly and Barnes (2023) define a care-full approach to research as one that seeks to be inclusive and responsive to the contexts of research participants, striving for ethical integrity throughout the study. A care-full approach pays close attention to the research process itself, rather than just focusing on outcomes. It involves being attentive to small moments such as communication with participants and the handling of data. It attends to relational interactions between researchers and participants, and within the research team, reflecting the broader philosophy of an ethics of care. 

In this blog we reflect on how we as a team try to enact care in how we work with participants, with each other and with participant’s experiences in our approach to data analysis. In their book ‘Researching with care’, Brannelly and Barnes (2023) apply an ethics of care approach to participatory designs, emphasising collaboration between researchers and participants. Our project is not a participatory project per se. Yet, we still see value in drawing on an ethics of care approach in qualitative interview studies, as have others (Marzetti, 2024), to improve accessibility and equity, reflecting on how the research process feels for participants and ourselves. 

A care-full approach to research builds on the five key elements of an 'ethics of care research manifesto': caring about (attentiveness), caring for (responsibility), caregiving (competence), care receiving (responsiveness), and caring with (solidarity) (Brannelly, 2018). We applied these elements to how we communicated with participants before, during and after the interview, as well as extending these elements to the analysis and dissemination phase.

It has been helpful to combine writing around an ethics of care with ideas of slow scholarship (Berg and Seeber, 2016) and crip time (Price, 2024). We are excited to explore the relationship between an ethics of care, crip time, and slow scholarship, as well as experiences of time in the university, using participant data and our own reflections as a research team

We seek to reclaim time, through experimenting, when possible, with ‘deliberation over acceleration’ (Berg and Seeber, 2016), with working ‘slow and fast’. We want to make visible how we are able to make this happen and where it becomes difficult in a project that is time constrained and demands outputs within the neoliberal university (Pearce, 2020). At the same time we acknowledge that in the current climate producing timely outputs is important to care with and show solidarity. This has been important to many of our participants who have asked us in the interviews what our project is hoping to achieve, where and with whom we will share findings. Raising awareness about the experiences of disabled, neurodivergent and ill academics has been important for us from the outset, particularly as some of the research team identify as ill and neurodivergent and are acutely aware how disability can often feel like an absent presence (Koutsouris et al, 2025) in university EDI initiatives. Drawing on Ahmed’s (2006) concept of non-performativity, Koutsouris et al (2025) have identified that within university diversity and inclusion discourses disability is often an ‘afterthought’ rather than a core institutional focus and commitment. Phipps and McDonell (2021) reflect on their equality and diversity work within UK universities. They ask the question ‘if you can be a revolutionary in the pay of the master; or if at most you can hope to mutiny and start an insurrection?’ (p. 513). We are grappling with our own constraints of caring with within a neoliberal university context and being responsible is for us also connected to being transparent about or own position as academics employed at the university, some of us on precarious contracts that will end when this project ends. Please keep an eye out for further reflections as we move from the analysis into the dissemination phase. 

In this blog, we will now focus on how we have tried to enact a care-full approach in our data collection and analysis.

Before our interviews with participants, we offered them copies of the interview schedule (in a format that is best for them). Interviews could be conducted online, in person or via written responses (or a combination of these). After the interview, participants were given the opportunity to review the transcripts; summaries or any articles published with quotations from them. 

Similalrly, Budworth (2023) combines feminist thinking with crip theory and writes about the importance of being flexible in research with disabled and chronically ill people, allowing flexibility in the format, space and time of the interview. For some of our participants doing the interview online worked best, while others appreciated meeting in person. Budworth (2023) writes that their emphasis on research with disabled people is not to suggest a ‘special’ or ‘different’ approach (…), but instead to demonstrate the wide-ranging benefits of adopting flexible methodological approaches when conducting ‘care-full’ qualitative research (p. 2). Similarly, we suggest that following principles of universal design means that a more flexible approach to qualitative interviewing is helpful in projects in a variety of contexts, and can help to widen inclusion and participation in research for many.

In our analysis of interviews, we are drawing on the concept of crip time and slow scholarship to play with and use different approaches, which allow us to work fast and slow. The analysis is conducted by three members of the team and we have used Nvivo Collaborate for the first time to work together asynchronously and synchronously on different and the same transcripts.  We push back against the idea that there is a sole analyst (an idea that is perpetuated by the qualitative data analysis packages that make it difficult to share coding as part of that analysis).  While getting the software to work took time and energy, we believed it was important to create a collaborative approach to analysis. 21 in-depth interviews might seem like a too big sample to engage in a detailed and care-full analysis. However, we purposefully have built in regular group sessions where we come together after having worked with two to three interviews each. Interpreting data in group sessions is not merely used as a means to establish inter coder reliability and finalise the coding framework applied to the data, but has greater significance and meaning. It allows us to pause and to create a space for regular reflexivity, to explore and make visible our perceptions and interpretations, while aiming to create a shared understanding. By slowing down we create space to stay with the experience of each participant before the development of themes across interviews. 

Our analytic approach does not only use different forms of speed, we also take time to zoom in and zoom out. While the coding in Nvivo collaborate across researchers helps us to identify similarities and differences across interviews, in our group discussions we have also made time to look at specific extracts and interpret and discuss these in detail line by line. In this example, paying care-full attention to what participants are saying connects to ideas of slow scholarship, allowing for enough time for an in-depth analysis.  This has meant spending an hour or more on a specific section within an interview, while also reflecting on how it fits within the overall narrative of the interview (what came before and after). However, our approach is also informed by ethics and the desire to not lose sight of the experiences of each participant. There is an inherent risk in thematic approaches and in the use of software like Nvivo to lose sight of the person’s individual story which was shared in the interview encounter (Rodriguez-Dorans & Jacobs, 2020). By combining thematic analysis with an in-depth narrative one, we hope to remedy the ‘fragmentation of quotes’, and to facilitate a care-full analysis that involves multiple readings, paying attention to clear and direct meanings, as well as reading between the lines, considering subtext, symbolism, and connotations (Sevenhuijsen, 2003; Brannelly and Barnes, 2022). 

We are hoping to finalise our analysis in the Spring and the next phase will involve continued reflections to make sure our writing and dissemination will be thoughtful, detailed and nuanced. 

References:

Ahmed, S. (2006). The nonperformativity of antiracism. Meridians, 7(1), 104-126.

Berg, M., & Seeber, B. K. (2016). The slow professor: Challenging the culture of speed in the academy. University of Toronto Press.

Brannelly, T. (2018). An ethics of care research manifesto. International Journal of Care and Caring, 2(3), 367-378.

Budworth, P. (2023). Care, comfort, and capacity: The importance of being flexible in research with disabled and chronically ill people. SSM-Qualitative Research in Health, 4, 100352. 

Koutsouris, G., Stentiford, L., Dimitrellou, E., Yu, Z., Pujaningsih, & Azizah, N. (2025). The absent presence of disability in British higher education. British Educational Research Journal.

Marzetti, H. (2024). Exploring possibilities for a feminist ethic of collective care in suicide research. Feminism & Psychology, 34(4), 598-616.

Pearce, R. (2020). A methodology for the marginalised: Surviving oppression and traumatic fieldwork in the neoliberal academy. Sociology, 54(4), 806-824.

Phipps, A., & McDonnell, L. (2022). On (not) being the master’s tools: five years of ‘Changing University Cultures’. Gender and Education, 34(5), 512-528.

Price, M. (2024). Crip spacetime. Duke University Press.

Rodríguez-Dorans, E., & Jacobs, P. (2020). Making narrative portraits: a methodological approach to analysing qualitative data. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 23(6), 611-623.

Sevenhuijsen, S. (2004). Trace: A method for normative policy analysis from the ethic of care. The Heart of the Matter. The Contribution of the Ethic of Care to Social Policy in Some New EU Member States, 13-46.