writing – Ethnographic Marginalia

The Fragility of Existence: Fieldwork, Vulnerability, and the Unspoken

17 August 2026 Afsheen Rizvi While some university students were busy eating their lunch at Jamia Women’s Canteen, we sat with Sughra trying to understand her food habits, nutritional focus and dietary preferences. The questions on our interview schedule were designed as initiators, intended to unravel individual stories based on how respondents engaged with them.…

Messy Methods: Ethnography Under Structural Violence

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…

What is Lost Still Follows You

Of Marital Rape, or “What do they do when they can’t find a body?”

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,…

‘Bearing Witness’ in the Field

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…

Fielding the Familiar: Reflections on Researching the Hometown

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?

Ethnographic Marginalia

Tag: writing