NewWorkTech Project Blogpost: First-hand insight into the research on work-related capacities of people with disabilities and the general workforce

NewWorkTech Project Blogpost: First-hand insight into the research on work-related capacities of people with disabilities and the general workforce

By Annamari Korhonen, Tampere University

I’m on the morning train, following a visually impaired person on their trip to another city. A
normal working day for a post-doc researcher in an ethnographic research project, that is.
In NewWorkTech, we want to help build better world of work for everyone – and we want to
do it through research at workplaces and on-the-job training environments. Finding points
of success and witnessing obstacles are equally important to us. That’s also what this trip
is about.
During this first year of the project, fieldwork is a main focus. It starts with recruitment of
participants and applying for research permits with various organisations. Next, I pack up
two cameras, tripods, a voice recorder and the notebook where I jot down everything that
could potentially be important about the workplace and what happens there. I go to a
workplace, shake hands, get consent signatures and sit down to find out what makes the
place tick. After a few days of observation and filming interesting work tasks and
interaction with colleagues, I interview the participant to learn more about what helps or
hinders them in the work, how they use technology and what could be improved.
We work with video cameras and recorders, and while it sometimes seems that at least
50% of my work is carrying the equipment, those are not our only tools; we also work with
theories from the fields of social and cognitive sciences as well as applied linguistics and
interaction research. Theories help us understand what we see and how it relates to other
systems and concepts.
What’s best about fieldwork? The learning. I get to meet people in a wide variety of
environments and see how work communities are organised on a social level, how people
help each other without making it a big deal, and how well-being at work can be built as an
ongoing project that hums below the surface of everyday work. And what’s best, I, as a
member of the NWT team, have the opportunity