Research on gendered politics of the field has delved into the practices of accompaniment and its implications on research and knowledge production, particularly through the case of researchers’ children and partners. In comparison, the tendency to seek assistance from parents is neglected within the scholarship. Drawing on the PhD fieldwork experiences of two researchers in their “native” country, specifically a Sri Lankan researcher conducting fieldwork in Sri Lanka and a North Indian scholar researching in South India, the paper reveals parents’ contribution to the research process, in terms of enhancing researcher credibility, facilitating contact‐making and access, and providing emotional and practical care. The discussion illuminates two aspects of parents’ involvement in fieldwork: (1) how the unique nature of parent–child relationships shapes the research process at multiple stages, and (2) how the gendered notions of knowledge production result in parents’ contributions being typically unacknowledged. The paper emphasises that a researcher's positionality as a daughter shapes her ability to navigate gendered field sites in her “native” country and is implicated in the wider research process.

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This entry is about communities living in informal settlements in the “Global South.” The Hollywood movie Slumdog Millionaire , which associated the plight of slum‐dwellers with that of dogs was met by protests from the communities it represented. Although the struggles of people represented in the movie were stark, the word “slumdog” did not resonate well with a large number of people in the Majority World. The subaltern school particularly challenges this dystopic view of the slum. Scholars across the world have written about how slums not only are sites of great deprivation, injustice, and violence but also represent collective spirit, resilience, innovation, and resistance. More specifically, Ananya Roy argues that there is a need to challenge this dualistic thinking regarding slums by interrogating the peripheries, informality, zones of exception, and the gray spaces which they represent.