Ethnographic (dis) locations: An approach for studying marginalisation in the context of socio-economic change

Abstract

This paper revisits discussions about the pursuit of a singular location for ethnographic research. Citing challenges to the fixity of location, from circulation of people to the impossibility of containing digital worlds, scholars have proposed multi-sited, multi-scalar, multi-modal and multi-sensorial ethnographies, advocating that the researcher ‘follow the actor’. Drawing upon these innovations, this paper traces the affects generated in the process of following the actors as well as the consequent blurring of the division between the researcher and the researched so that they together constitute the category of ‘actors’ who co-produce the field. Using the example of an ethnography with young lower middle class women in Delhi, this paper deploys the researcher’s experience of dislocation or unexpected shuttling in the field to develop ‘dislocation’ as a methodological and analytical strategy for studying marginalisation in the context of socio-economic change by embracing intersubjective relations, affects and partiality of knowledge in ethnographic research.

Plastic Bodies: Women Workers and Emerging Body Rules in Service Work in Urban India

“…Although I had initially hoped to situate myself in a workplace, as is conventional with ethnographies of work (Smith 2001), my early observations revealed that women circulated among various kinds of short-term jobs in cafes, shopping malls, call centers, and offices. I therefore decided to follow their working lives rather than paid work in isolation (Islam 2021, 2022).…”

Patchwork ethnography

“…Many scholars are already spreading the seeds of the manifesto. Some argue that it is not only fieldwork but also the ethnographer who is patchwork (Chua, 2021), that dislocation (Islam, 2022) or punctuated access to a place (Thieme, 2021) might be a more apt way to understand certain forms of ethnographic research, and that patchwork ethnography bolsters existing work based on collaborative methods (e.g., Berg et al., 2022; Hong, 2021). On our website (https://www.patchworkethnography.com/conversations), we showcase ethnographers who share with us how patchwork ethnography gives a name to their alternative forms of fieldwork.…”