The COVID-19 pandemic and the public health responses instigated numerous societal transformations, including the further socialisation of remote work and the creating, reproducing, and severing of work practices. From this starting point, this presentation investigates and evaluates methodological approaches toward understanding the day-to-day adaptation of urban workers. It explores the use of social practices captured in research diaries as a way to capture contemporary work practices and collaborations in knowledge-based occupations - i.e. working from home – and the implications for climate change adaptation that arise from that shift. Data for this study emerged from a collaborative self-reflexive process conducted by climate change researchers at RMIT University. By doing so, this research offers insights into the specific impacts on those working with a particular focus on climate change adaptation, acknowledging that the labour of climate change research can be disruptive in slow, emerging, and sometimes eventful ways, which impacts work in the university and its work.
The presentation reflects on research diaries as a qualitative method for understanding climate change impacts in urban and knowledge-based work settings, an under-researched aspect of climate impacts. This includes how the work of the organisation is performed, a university in this instance. As an exploration of methods, reflections on the diary process and its prospective use in other contexts and with larger study groups are considered. This includes the importance of undertaking the pilot study with climate change researchers; use of the method to understand the impacts recognised participants, or to understand the prevalence of impacts on workers and the associated implications; and, the implications of the data for climate change adaptation across urban geographies.