ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on research on music-making from balconies in Spain to discuss the possibilities and limitations of qualitative interviewing during COVID-19 pandemic; it discusses the need to redefine the epistemological, theoretical, and ethical underpinning of qualitative research caused in contexts of pandemic distress. Much had to change in terms of research design, logistics, and use of data to cope with the uncertainty associated with a very new type of crisis, and the overwhelming set of emotions that governed the daily life of both respondents and researchers at that time. This work defends the idea of situated resilience to address practices of qualitative data collection on the impacts of the pandemic to develop strategies that are both ethically and emotionally responsible. It also addresses the idea of “sensitivity”, proposing a move from the framework of sensitive topics to the wider idea of sensitive contexts.
