Studies in global higher education may often create impression that the field is a relatively stable and predictable environment where access to research sites can be planned, participants can be approached safely, and ethical issues can be managed through standardized procedures. Such an attitude can be partly explained by the fact that crises have become frequent in many higher education systems overwhelmed with a gamut of economic, political and social disruptions (Tight, 2024). The assumptions of stability affect the conceptualization of research in the field and underpin dominant approaches to qualitative research and interpretations of methodological rigour (Guillemin & Gillam, 2004). In the settings affected by existential crises (eg. wars and major political or militarized conflicts), higher education systems are, however, rarely predictable or secure. Universities are often disrupted by violence, displacement, or institutional collapse, rendering research conditions volatile and uncertain (Milton & Barakat, 2016; Oleksiyenko, 2024; Oleksiyenko & Terepyschhyj, 2024). While scholarship in higher education often conceptualizes crisis as an episodic disruption to institutional normalcy (Gigliotti, 2022), research in protracted conflict and non-state contexts suggests a different condition—one in which crisis functions as a persistent structural context shaping how higher education operates and research strategies are implemented.

In the conflict-affected environments, higher education research requires methodological flexibility that extends beyond conventional designs (Oleksiyenko, 2024). The proposed study examines how adaptive reflexivity acquires a new methodological stance for conducting qualitative research in crisis-affected contexts. The study draws on insights from higher education fieldwork in Ukraine during the Russian invasion of 2022-2026 and in the Ethnic Higher Education (EHE) areas of Myanmar, managed by Myanmar’s Ethnic Revolutionary Organizations (EROs) after the 2021 military coup. While these two cases show interrelations with concerns to unceasing crisis and insecurity (Oleksiyenko, 2024; Rahmat et al., 2026), they also provide insights into differences of methodological negotiation, which impregnates decisions about access, consent, and data protection with considerable ethical and political implications. The comparative study shows that traditional frameworks of fieldwork and data collection, which are built on assumptions of institutional stability, predictable access, and researcher safety, prove inadequate when higher education systems are in existential crisis.

This study examines the interrelation of three methodological dimensions: (1) negotiating ethical trust and participant safety amid compromised physical access; (2) sustaining analytic rigor and data credibility through remote, fragmented, and adaptive research designs; and (3) practicing reflexivity as an ongoing process of balancing positionality, empathy, and emotional resilience. While investigators pinpoint key logistical and ethical constraints in managing these dimensions, the comparative analysis also sheds light on how a critical perspective on integration of knowledge about these constraints can help in questioning whose knowledge is legitimized in higher education research and how crisis contexts reveal the limits of conventional epistemic authority.

This study is important in the context of worsening geopolitical conditions in global higher education. When the global discourse overlooks growing political implications for marginalized and vulnerable academic groups affected by military actions, it should be recognized that crisis-related research should be given more attention. Higher education institutions do play a distinctive role in crisis-affected societies, including sustaining professional pathways, supporting leadership and civic capacity, and maintaining longer-term educational futures (Milton & Barakat, 2016). Where higher education institutions themselves are contested, displaced, or excluded from state systems, they also become political sites in which authority, legitimacy, and collective identity are negotiated (Novelli et al., 2017; South & Lall, 2016; Oleksiyenko, 2024). Hence, rethinking of methodological approaches should intensify as well (Rahmat et al., 2026; Wong & Kareng, 2024; Olesiyenko &Tavadze, 2024; Oleksiyenko, Min & Khin, forthcoming).

This presentation compares lessons learned from fieldwork in the conflict-ridden areas of Myanmar and Ukraine. By looking into how researchers and participants redesign their relations during various phases of displacement and relocation, the study aims to understand what it really means for higher education investigators to engage with experiential insights in conflict-affected zones. The reflections on engagement with respondents from the areas affected by military control and surveillance in Myanmar, and by constant air-raids and destruction of civil infrastructure and academic facilities in Ukraine, provide unique accounts of challenges faced by both researchers and participants during the documentation of fieldwork planning and implementation. In Myanmar, the original design sought to include six ethnic higher education contexts across Chin, Kachin, Kayan, Karenni, Ta’ang, and Mon areas, combining in-person and online engagement. However, access conditions shifted repeatedly as security situations evolved. Ultimately, only two regions—Mon and Karenni—could be visited in person. Planned fieldwork in other areas became infeasible due to security risks, travel restrictions, and logistical barriers, necessitating a greater reliance on remote engagement. Meanwhile, in Ukraine, access to universities in eastern regions such as Donetsk, Kherson and Luhansk oblasts became inaccessible after the full-scale invasion of the Russian armed forces in 2022. The security concerns increased all over Ukraine with frequent shelling and drone attacks conducted by the Russian armed forces. Hence, the focus of investigation was primarily moved to the institutions in Kyiv and Lviv, as more protected and safer areas for continued research. The principal investigator had to delegate fieldwork to his collaborators at the Ukrainian institutions, while sustaining online feedback and readjustment of research strategies. The comparative analysis shows how decisions concerning consent, anonymity, recording, and data storage differed in the two contexts, where in-field and online methods were mixed and renegotiation of participation depended on access conditions, trust relationships, and security deliberations. Ethics in practice with regard to situations in which ethical significance emerges through interaction rather than procedural design became a major approach in both countries. Within the post-soviet context of Ukraine where academic research used to be limited and institutional ethics reviews are rudimentary, concerns about the participation and privacy are often a headache of foreign investigators who are supposed to take responsibility on behalf of vulnerable participants. The sharing of knowledge and the search for emotional support often overlapped during escalated security concerns, requiring extra sensitivity to participants’ long-term safety.

Higher education research is expected to be conducted responsibly, rigorously, and ethically under conditions of crisis. This study shows that methodological frameworks developed for stable, state-centred research environments are often ill-equipped for contexts in which access is uncertain, participant safety cannot be taken for granted, and institutional legitimacy is contested. In response, the presenters argue that adaptive reflexivity as a methodological position should be given more regard under conditions of uncertainty. It should be recognized that crisis operates as a structural condition shaping how research is planned, conducted, and interpreted in modern days. Methodological challenges in crisis-affected higher education—such as managing participant risk, navigating uneven data generation, and responding to emotional and relational pressures—do not arise as isolated technical problems. Instead, they are mutually constitutive dimensions of research practice, rendering piecemeal methodological adjustments inadequate and underscoring the need for a coherent reflexive stance. Respectively, adaptive reflexivity should engage retrospective self-reflection or positional disclosure with increasing emphasis on an ongoing, relational, and context-responsive mode of methodological judgement embedded throughout the research process. Its core components—ethical co-construction, relational rigor, contextual validity, and emotional and positional awareness—provide a structured vocabulary for sustaining methodological quality when stability, control, and predictability are limited. Through adaptation, iteration, and recalibration, research in crisis contexts achieves more by reducing over-reliance on linear execution of predefined designs. Importantly, adaptive reflexivity does not lower methodological standards. On the contrary, it demands heightened accountability. Where researchers cannot rely on uniform methods, saturation, or stable access, rigor must be demonstrated through transparent justification of decisions, coherence of analytic reasoning, and careful alignment between claims and the conditions under which data are generated. In this way, adaptive reflexivity reframes rigor, ethics, and validity without diluting them, while making methodological discipline responsive to constraint rather than insulated from it.

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