'Can You Hear Me?': Five Reflections on Building Rapport Online During the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic

Building rapport with research participants is crucial for ethnographic research. The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has intensified the existing challenges of building rapport. In this article, five researchers explore the ethical and methodological implications of adapting their research processes to comply with the restrictions imposed during the pandemic. The researchers, each at various stages of their dissertation projects, ask a familiar question with renewed relevance: How can meaningful, reciprocal relationships be built with interlocutors through digital interactions? The planned fieldwork, with bazaar traders in Ukraine and Bishkek, adolescents in a Romanian post-industrial region, breastfeeding mothers in Germany, museum employees in Papua New Guinea and street ‘artivists’ in Los Angeles, was not intended to take place remotely. Five PhD students at different stages of their doctoral projects met at the DGSKA Autumn School, ‘Fieldwork meets crisis’, where they decided to analyze their rapport-building strategies during the pandemic together, as they were facing different challenges in applying the methods of digital ethnography for their originally on-foot planned research. Yet evaluating the approaches that have been adapted to conceptualize, conduct, and interpret online ethnographic research provides fertile ground for discussing the following interconnected questions: How can relationships be built and maintained online? How is corporality related to trust? And to what extent is reciprocity possible online? By critically reflecting on these questions, the five researchers seek to take forward the longstanding and under-theorized debate in anthropology on building rapport.