26 September 2025 Aishwarya Ahmed Swarming through a sea of celebrating people at a snail’s pace, we were greeted by strangers banging on the car’s window, shouting the celebratory greetings “Eid Mubarak” and “Happy Independence Day”. It was August 5th, 2024, the day Bangladesh’s authoritarian government fell, and caught between the celebration and chaos on…
17 August 2025 Indu Poornima I thought I knew the sea … The sea disciplines itself into a rhythmic tranquillity, insisting that I let go of the unforgiving cacophony in my head. Occasionally, it would send lost belongings, floating on its waters, for me to find. I kept some — they claimed space in the…
13 January 2025 Rogelio Ramos Torres On the road A misty moon shines at midnight over a rushing crowd in a sports park on the coast of Chiapas, Mexico. More than three thousand people, members of one of the last caravans that for some years have been crossing the country heading north, are preparing their…
11 October 2024 Urmi Bhattacheryya What follows is a piece of fiction, written for a PhD-level seminar called “Feminist Media Studies” at the University of Colorado, Boulder, instructed by Dr Michela Ardizzoni. However, what it also is, is a pastiche of life experiences and voices that have been articulated to me, over and over again,…
Read more Of Marital Rape, or “What do they do when they can’t find a body?”
28 August 2024 Shahdab Perumal The sun is merciless in April. I mostly stay at home and spend time with my mother Salma. In some ways, the privilege of doing fieldwork in my village is that it blurs the distinction between home and field. My conversation with my mother blurs that distinction further. Our conversations…
What “degrees of familiarity” can expand or limit fieldwork for an ethnographer based in the Global South? Or to put it more simply, who can afford to be familiar or distant?
Read more Fielding the Familiar: Reflections on Researching the Hometown
Ethnographic Marginalia 