Reflections about handling interview data from third countries at European universities: Collaboration opportunities and/or risky business for participants and researchers?

Through reflections about a case study concerning an unfeasible, planned research study on nurses’ working days during the COVID-19 pandemic, the article aims to describe and discuss legal and ethical challenges when conducting European-based research together with nurses in third countries. The article highlights how the General Data Protection Regulation challenges EU and non-EU research collaborations and research across borders in healthcare research. Digitally recorded interview data can be traced, putting both research participants and researchers at risk in relation to confidentiality, safety and potential critical views by national regimes. This raises ethical claims for research collaborations between EU and third countries and hampers the possibilities to make silent voices discernible through research. It is a questionable solution both to collaborate and not to collaborate with third countries such as China. Further reflections on the ways forward to facilitate research collaboration between EU and third countries are needed. © The Author(s) 2022.

Limit your body area - a COVID-19 mass radicalisation challenging autonomy and basic human rights. (Special Issue: Human rights in healthcare during COVID-19 and other pandemics.)

Purpose - This paper aims to explore articulations of how individuals internalise official demands on handling COVID-19 and the function of social media in this process, and further to discuss this from a human rights' perspective. Design/methodology/approach - A thematic analysis of qualitative data from an international survey on COVID-19 and social media. The analysis was inspired by Berger and Luckmann's theory of reality as a social construction. Findings - Articulations expressed an instant internalisation and externalisation of the officially defined "new normal". However, negotiations of this "new normal" were articulated, whereby everyday life activities could proceed. Resistance to the "new normal" appeared, as routines and common sense understandings of everyday life were threatened. Health-care professionals were put in a paradoxical situation, living in accordance with the "new normal" outside work and legitimately deviating from it at work. The "new normal" calls for individuals' "oughtonomy" rather than autonomy. Social media were used to push individual's re-socialisation into the "new normal". The latter both promoted and challenged human rights as the individual's right to self-determination extends beyond the self as it risks threatening other people's right to life. Originality/value - With the means of a theoretically based thematic analysis inspired by Berger and Luckmann, the current study shows how articulations on COVID-19 and social media can both support and challenge human rights and reality as a facticity as dictated by dominant organisations and discourses in society.