No abstract

Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, the value of online qualitative research methodologies are increasingly being recognised within violence/abuse and legal research, but few academic papers explore the process of undertaking research wholly online which explores the intersect of both legal research methods and the exploration of the lived experiences of domestic abuse victims. For the potential of legal and domestic scholarly work to be fully recognised within academic publications and teaching, appropriate consideration of methodological issues surrounding qualitative online research methodologies is needed. This paper reflects on the experiences of one domestic abuse researcher undertaking online research during the UK’s national COVID19 lockdown when government legislation meant most socio-legal academics were restricted to conducting all research from their homes. This paper highlights the process where choosing the data collection online method (Microsoft Teams) was carefully considered to provide rich data insights that would help explore the research question under investigation. Online Microsoft Teams interviews were a successful method of undertaking scholarship examining one victims’ experience and its interconnectedness with the law. This was since they provided an in-depth understanding of the topic undertaken in a deeply private setting where a lack of face-to-face interaction seemed to enhance the richness of the data shared. The paper includes a total of five reflections are offered to help future researchers considering, and undertaking, online interviews within the field of domestic violence and legal research.

The sonic-social relationships of people singing together, chanting, or engaged in group vocality are underrepresented in voice, sound, and music studies. Work on the voice tends to focus on individual voices, despite the human commonplace of group singing, choric chanting, and joint speech. This article brings into conversation practice-based, ethnographic, and theoretical perspectives on chorality to mark a noteworthy constellation of interdisciplinary work on voice; decolonial, antiracist, and LGBTQ+ activism; crowds and masses; intimate publics; and democratic politics. Writing in 2021 at a moment when voices joined in chants and anthems of protest assume tragic urgency, and when chanting and singing together risk physical and social violence and the transmission of COVID-19, the authors fix their attention on sonic-social relationships in chorality in order to set down how the precarity of this moment can translate into new thinking about joint voicing. In the case studies at the heart of this article, the authors offer four frames for approaching sonic-social relationships in chorality—activist choirs, collegiate a cappella, call-response singing, and virtual choirs. They advocate for a both-and approach to the sonic-social relationship in chorality: Sound qualities matter, often urgently, as does chorality’s social power to include, capture, and exclude. Ultimately, the article stresses that chorality is ethically neutral—a key methodological consideration in encountering chorality. What emerges from chorality’s sonic-social relationships, then, is the presence or absence of care—care for the effects of chorality’s uplift or harm, carelessness with chorality’s difference-leveling potentials, and chorality as an upwelling of care.