Engaging in transnational feminist praxis: Ethical and methodological considerations around power and participation in India

• In Event: Power, participation, and representation in conducting research with underrepresented communities in India, Belize, Mexico, and Pakistan

Proposal

In this paper, I contextualize the process of engaging in ethnographic research during crisis amidst my long-term research with rural communities of women in Western India during the COVID-19 pandemic. I describe efforts to engage in a feminist research project focused on centering the experiences of women who have been educated in and a part of one of the longest standing women’s non-governmental organizations in India. Members of this collective (or Sangha) include three generations of women and adolescent aged girls. This paper outlines what relational ethnographic research, where the researchers are spatially distinct, looks like. It highlights both the importance, but also limitations, of doing feminist, relational research amidst contexts with massive material and structural constraints.

This paper is based on over 6months of data collection with women from sanghas in the Western, Indian state of Gujarat alongside detailed fieldnotes and analytic memoing by myself and my co-researcher based in Gujarat. This project assesses the gendered dynamics of COVID-19 amongst these communities in Gujarat. While these communities are amongst the hardest affected in Western India – comprised of rural migrant and informal sector workers with little and unreliable access to health care services – we sought to discover whether they were able to draw upon an additional infrastructure of support and resilience given their previous empowerment activities (Stromquist 2015; ICRW 2020). This project was based in three regions across Gujarat where I have been working for the past 15 years and is driven by two primary research objectives: 1) to understand what meanings Gujarati women attribute to the pandemic; and 2) to gain insight into how has the pandemic disrupted and reinforced existing relations of power. In other words, I ask, in what ways do these women express their own agency regarding and during the pandemic?

In order to reflect on the meaning and implications of doing feminist research with this group of women, I draw from Ross (2002) who proposes considering relational theorizing, and asserts that relational theorizing is part of and can contribute to the central ontological, epistemological, theoretical, and methodological questions in our field In this paper, I describe how I draw from Ross (2002) to encourage being‐in‐relationship through inclusive, multilateral, and generative approaches to power and respect. Much of this literature is situated in a narrative of care or, as Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot has written, “symmetry, empathy, and connection … sustained only through constant attention to the work of challenging and dismantling hierarchies” (Lightfoot, ). On the one hand, this perspective questions the basic relevance and value of research in impacting the material and every day realities of our participants. On the other hand, it reveals the ways that we have to examine closely what collective belonging, duty, and responsibility looks like. What are the ethical dimensions that emerge when you have collectives that are spacially, materially, and structurally, in terms of power hierarchies, disparate?

Author

• Payal Shah, University of South Carolina