SSSP 2024 Annual Meeting

Date: Saturday, August 10

Time: 12:30 PM - 2:10 PM

Session 066: Doing Fieldwork in the Global South
Room: Musset

Sponsors: Program Committee
Transnational Initiatives Committee

Organizer, Presider &

Discussant: Debadatta Chakraborty, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Description: 

This session includes critical reflections on doing ethnography in and from the global south. The five papers in this session address a range of key methodological, theoretical, ethical, and existential questions for ethnographers around positionality, risk, serendipity, affect, embodiment, subjective locations, power, violence, and their relationship to ethnographic witnessing, writing and knowledge production. The papers draw on a range of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork experience of scholars in India, South Africa, Jamaica, Bangladesh, and Hong Kong. Overall, the session contributes to deeper questions on negotiation of intersectional identities for and by the ethnographers themselves in relation to the communities they are embedded in and the generative possibilities of such negotiations in exacerbating and mitigating colonial and gendered-racialized harms, risks, and violence.

Papers:

“Gender, Race, and Class as Resources in Global South Ethnography,” Annie Hikido, Colby College

“Serendipity or Structure? Reflections on Power, Privilege, and Pleasure during Fieldwork in Hyderabad, India,” Sneha Annavarapu, National University of Singapore

“‘Belly Pain’: Violence, Method, and Ethnographic Witnessing,” Sadiyah Malcolm, University of Michigan

“Gender, Caste, Class, and Positionality: Reflections on Intersectional Power and Its Interstices from Fieldwork in Bangladesh and India,” Debadatta Chakraborty, University of Massachusetts Amherst