27 March 2026 Priyanjali Mitra I initially intended to study the working lives of migrant workers in a city I grew up in and thought I knew. What I was not prepared for was how consistently those conversations kept turning toward fear, precarity, everyday violence as one register of a much larger, layered order of…
Read more Messy Methods: Ethnography Under Structural Violence
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 