Loading...
Start Date
24-6-2022 12:00 AM
End Date
24-6-2022 12:00 AM
Abstract
The summer of 2020 posed various challenges for scholars across the world continuing to do ‘fieldwork’ alongside national lockdowns and international travel restrictions. In response to these restrictions, humanities and social science scholars began hosting online seminars and roundtables reflecting on the peculiarities of the moment. In particular, for those in institutional locations in the Global North, but whose ‘fields’ were situated elsewhere, most often, in the Global South, inquiry focused on possible ways to move forward with their research projects. With the pandemic interrupting ‘research as usual’ these colloquiums contemplated questions of both object and method. They questioned present approaches to research, highlighted opportunities for transnational collaboration, and initiated a discussion on the possibilities opened up by remote modes of research. Many of them were inward looking - South Asian scholars in Global North institutes speaking with each other about how 'fieldwork' had been disrupted, and consequently how one could 'rethink' ways of doing research. These talks rarely considered or spoke to a researcher in the global south institute whose research might have similar problems despite their 'geographic' closeness to the field.
As a scholar located in the elsewhere – India in this case – studying the ways in which knowledges travel between the ‘field’ in the Global South and the ‘metropolitan institution’ in the Global North - this moment provided me another opportunity to reflect on the ways in which access and identity, themselves mediated, shape and legitimise knowledge production. Given the rise of mobile phone technology and social media, the nature of the transnational relationship between the field and the university has changed drastically in the past decade. This paper examines mediation as a conceptual framework for understanding the multiple but contingent relationships amongst identity, space, time, and digital technologies that produce the quotidian.
Reinventing 'Fieldwork': The Screen as Site
The summer of 2020 posed various challenges for scholars across the world continuing to do ‘fieldwork’ alongside national lockdowns and international travel restrictions. In response to these restrictions, humanities and social science scholars began hosting online seminars and roundtables reflecting on the peculiarities of the moment. In particular, for those in institutional locations in the Global North, but whose ‘fields’ were situated elsewhere, most often, in the Global South, inquiry focused on possible ways to move forward with their research projects. With the pandemic interrupting ‘research as usual’ these colloquiums contemplated questions of both object and method. They questioned present approaches to research, highlighted opportunities for transnational collaboration, and initiated a discussion on the possibilities opened up by remote modes of research. Many of them were inward looking - South Asian scholars in Global North institutes speaking with each other about how 'fieldwork' had been disrupted, and consequently how one could 'rethink' ways of doing research. These talks rarely considered or spoke to a researcher in the global south institute whose research might have similar problems despite their 'geographic' closeness to the field.
As a scholar located in the elsewhere – India in this case – studying the ways in which knowledges travel between the ‘field’ in the Global South and the ‘metropolitan institution’ in the Global North - this moment provided me another opportunity to reflect on the ways in which access and identity, themselves mediated, shape and legitimise knowledge production. Given the rise of mobile phone technology and social media, the nature of the transnational relationship between the field and the university has changed drastically in the past decade. This paper examines mediation as a conceptual framework for understanding the multiple but contingent relationships amongst identity, space, time, and digital technologies that produce the quotidian.
Bio
Nithila Kanagasabai is PhD candidate in Women’s Studies at the Tata Institute Social Sciences, Mumbai, India. Her areas of interest include academic mobilities, research cultures, digital cultures, feminist media studies, feminist pedagogy, and journalism studies. Her work has appeared in journals such as Feminist Media Studies and Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education.