ON REFUGEES, RESEARCHERS, VIRUSES, DATA, AND HOW THEY AFFECT EACH OTHER. A POST-QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS

This article discusses the possibilities that post-qualitative inquiry can offer to the psychology of work and organizations and its methodological and ethical implications for research. It does so through the example of how changes in the socio-historical context of the researchers (i.e., the Covid-19 pandemic) can affect the analysis of empirical data. We (re)analyzed two vignettes, part of a large ethnographic study aimed at exploring practices and discourses of integration in two refugee reception centers in Italy. The empirical analysis shows how the process of knowledge production can be erratic and unpredictable, evolving through the encounter of multiple fields of information such as data, theories, researchers' experiences, and methods within the socio-historical-cultural background in which the inquiry is conducted. By embedding the (re)analysis in these changing sources of information, we show how it is possible to produce new knowledge from old/new data within a changed context in time and space.