BASAS organised an online workshop for Graduate students and Early Career Researchers on how to do fieldwork. The session was conducted by Dr. Kasia Paprocki (Associate Professor of Environment, Department of Geography and Environment, LSE), and Dr. Sahana Ghosh (Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, NUS). Drawing from the rich expertise of the speakers and their extensive experience of doing fieldwork in Bangladesh, India and along the India-Bangladesh border, the session featured topics on how to do fieldwork, the ethics and challenges of conducting fieldwork in South Asia, as well as the role of the researcher working among marginalised communities. There was a Q&A with the speakers during the session. Some of the questions asked during the workshop were:
- How should the information obtained during ethnographic interviews, be cited in a research study when the speaker wishes to remain anonymous, but the information provided is crucial or pathbreaking for the research?
- To what extent can the researcher’s fieldnotes substitute for direct citations when dealing with confidential or restricted information?
- How might the researcher disclose the existence of sensitive but uncitable data while maintaining methodological transparency?
- How can one ethically compensate the interviewees/respondents for their time and efforts?
- What is the best procedure to liaise with organizations to have an institutional repository where one can archive recordings (of interviews, performances, documentary evidence) for use in future?
- How much of your own life history as a researcher (for instance, your childhood or where you grew up) would you share with respondents if they asked? How might a researcher’s positionality, particularly coming from a more socially privileged background, influence respondents’ perceptions?
- How can one use data, when they are in a setting where they can’t make them sign the consent form? What is the best practice of using that data?
- How, especially in the case of Soldiering (Sahana’s current research) – which is something you didn’t expect where you would land from earlier research – where you said the relationship is not desirable with increasing militarisation does one exercise empathy?
- My research is a multi-sited ethnography of urban land governance in Mumbai. It involves me in studying the state – government employees across scales. Honesty and deep relationships didn’t seem feasible here. Besides them, it engages me with ‘informal’ residents, whose spaces are oversaturated sites of research. Neither they nor me are interested in developing deep relationships with them. My fieldwork has therefore been conversational but also information oriented. It also makes me wonder if what I do is ethnography at all. How can I think through this?
- How do we navigate the question of ‘access’ as a fieldworker? Given that it is becoming increasingly difficult to conduct fieldwork (and research in general) in South Asia due to the rapidly changing geo-political situations, what does ‘access’ and/or ‘not having access’ do in terms of adapting one’s research methods/scope continually?
About the Speakers:
Dr. Kasia Paprocki is Associate Professor of Environment at the Department of Geography and Environment, and Director of the Environment and Development Programme at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is also an affiliate at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. Her research is focused on South Asia, particularly Bangladesh and on the ways in which development interventions and knowledge systems shape communities and landscapes. Her first monograph, Threatening Dystopias: The Global Politics of Climate Change Adaptation in Bangladesh (Cornell University Press, 2022) was the winner of the BASAS Book Prize for 2023.
Dr. Sahana Ghosh is Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, National University of Singapore. Her work is focused on India and Bangladesh where she uses ethnography and feminist approaches to study a range of concerns, such as borders and borderlands, the mobility of people and goods, citizenship, refuge, the political economy of gendered labour and so on. Her first monograph, A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security Across the India-Bangladesh Borderlands (University of California Press, 2023) received the AAA’s Association of Political and Legal Anthropology (APLA) Book Prize in Critical Ethnography 2024, Honourable Mention.
You can view the recording of this event here.