DISPATCHES FROM THE FIELD
We feature long form essays that make use of ethnographic fieldwork as well as standalone field notes that tell a powerful story.
Field Notes.
Ethnographic Reflections.
20 February 2025
What is Lost Still Follows You
Casey Golomski
An excerpt from the book God’s Waiting Room (Rutgers University Press 2024) which is a work of creative, narrative nonfiction based on seven years of immersive, ethnographic research in a small-town old age home I call Grace. Amid the daily goings-on, I met several individuals whose stories showed me—and can show all of us, perhaps—how the end of life reconditions the way we might face our past, or dimensions of it that still hauntingly linger in the present…
13 January 2025
Challenging borders from a pair of pedals: Ethnographic insights of the bicycle riding migrant diaspora in Chiapas, Mexico
Rogelio Ramos Torres
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 departure. The pastors leading the group give instructions, the tents and tarpaulins that have served as shelter are dismantled, the stray dogs sniff for waste, the mothers pack clothes and water bottles, the children wake up, young people put on their shoes, old people stretch their backs to alleviate the pain, the backpacks go to the shoulders, the soles strike the ground and the march begins. It is essential to go ahead of the sun. Some make their last purchases from soda or food vendors who, even at that hour of the night, come to the road…
11 October 2024
Of Marital Rape, or “What do they do when they can’t find a body?”
Urmi Bhattacheryya
How are identities made and forged in the world’s purportedly largest democracy, where women may survive silent, chronic, long-term rape within marriages? What axes of citizenry do women still inhabit and claim as their own, in the light of publicly invisible sexual violence events, constrained to a space of socio-legal liminality? I do not know what the answers are at this juncture, but I hope this piece of “fiction” will help…for it is more than fiction.The voices in the short story that follows are embodied voices from the field – the problem that cannot be spoken of, isa problem we must speak of. If, indeed, marital rape is such a liminal concept for law and legalese, family and society to grasp; if indeed it must be hushed, then perhaps, “fiction” – a sense of creating something “digestible”, something disseminable – will help.
28 August 2024
‘Bearing Witness’ in the Field
Shahdab Perumal
Though my research is not about Palestine, it has had an overwhelming impact on how I conduct my fieldwork and everyday life. The question ‘What is the point of doing all of this now?’ dominates my thoughts, profoundly impacting my writing process, readings, and my free time. If I do not “bother” about Palestine and immerse in my ordinary and mundane activity, it leads to another worry about why I am not bothered about Palestine. It is not surprising or unusual that ‘redirection’ happens in the field. Redirection and reorientation, in fact, constitutes ethnographic fieldwork.
9 October 2023
On Loving A Hostile City
Medha V.
I remember this one evening as I was walking around Okhla with a male friend, he suddenly turned into a dark alleyway. I was startled at how casually he took that turn, while my brain and body froze even though I was in the company of someone I trusted deeply. With every path we don’t take, how many sights, sounds, smells and sensations do we miss out on?
My body knows how to absorb these shocks and quickly bounce back to its default setting now. But I am sure our systems store these things somewhere. What happens to these memories? Will my body ever learn to let go of them?
20 June 2022
Narrow lanes and deeper histories: Reflections from KG Halli
Omkar Nadh Pattela
While doing fieldwork, the lines of the Telugu poet Goreti Venkanna, which this piece started out with, reverberated in my head and resisted fading out for days after my fieldwork had apparently ended. Venkanna writes, “the lanes are narrow, but the story of the poor residing in this neighbourhood is deep [and] the homes of these people are tinier than a paan dhaabba1”. Every street I wandered and every home I visited for the next few months introduced me to people in this neighbourhood who had a story to tell me, and those stories were indeed profound. In what follows, I share some of these instances and several vignettes that reflect my subjective experience in trying to understand the place of KG Halli. These vignettes are short glimpses into the thoughts and conversations that constituted my fieldwork. They are written with a view to be fleeting scenes, notes from the field that become marginalia as I look for patterns, narratives, and the “big story” of health, poverty and inequality in the city of Bengaluru. These marginalia, I put forth, contain within them stories that sometimes go nowhere at all – an experience every ethnographer can, perhaps, relate to.
17 June 2022
Holocausto Norte and the Engines of Political Mobilization
Nicolás Torres-Echeverry
I had become bewildered by the fact that Colombia’s two central parties had almost completely vanished from the political scene after more than a century of dominating national politics. When I looked into other contexts, it turned out that there too parties were extremely weak or in the process of weakening. It seemed to me that since most of the political science literature, the old sociological literature, and a rising gang within sociology thought that parties were crucial—even indispensable—forces within democracies, it would be a good idea to write a dissertation about a context in which parties used to be central, but no longer: if parties were not where mobilization power resided, then where? And just like that I found myself in the field as the 2022 Colombian Congressional and Presidential elections unfolded, running into a collection of different social units that hold mobilization capacity with intriguing variation in their internal characteristics, the way they integrate upwards to “parties,” and downwards to their followers. Holocausto Norte, a group of soccer supporters, is a surprising one, as I will now explain.
18 March 2022
Rising Pressure: Housing Costs in the Face of COVID-19
Marisa Westbrook
Low-income Hispanic families in Denver were already struggling to pay for housing even before the pandemic hit in mid-March of 2020. As the pandemic began, I was several months into my ethnographic dissertation documenting the experiences of families in a neighborhood at risk of gentrification as these families faced the rising costs in Denver’s booming housing market. I started making connections in summer 2019 in the low-income southwest Denver neighborhood of Westwood. That winter, I began meeting with 35 low-income predominantly Hispanic residents to learn about their neighborhood, housing costs, and wellbeing. I attended neighborhood meetings, community events, and informational sessions and went on neighborhood tours and walks with residents as I slowly became welcome into their homes.
23 February 2022
Becoming a Preventionist
Max Greenberg
The flickering halogen inside the square trailer is no match for the sun outside and my eyes squint to adjust. The desks are packed in nine dense rows and dotted with scraps of the previous class —worksheets and Gatorade bottles litter the desks and floor. I slide into a desk by the near wall and pull the heavy white curriculum binder out of my bag, crisp and barely used. I shuffle through the sheets of the curriculum and do a last-minute review of the day’s unit. The students begin to squeak and thud in.
06 October 2021
There is Smoke in the Distance
Rachel Howard
I had lived in _____ before: over the previous few years, for a few weeks at a time, I would rent a room and arrange meetings, interviews, and volunteer with local groups to get familiar with the place and build a community. After three years of visits, my research questions were focused on the intersections of race, history, and climate change, taking place primarily with recent migrants who imagined this town as a kind of utopia. This place was one among many Western desert towns that developed, at the turn of the 20th century, still-powerful booster narratives that enticed white Americans to move there. How, I wanted to know, do we justify living in a place that was built on inequality and displacement and does not have the resources in place to support its own future? How do we justify breathing in smoke when the fire is all around us?
Ethnographic Marginalia 