Journeys of the I and we

Kavita Ramakrishnan

City, 2017, vol. 21, issue 2, 207-218

Abstract: For ethnographers repeatedly engaged with the same community on the ‘margins’, questions of access, positionality and representation become compounded by temporal dynamism. Participant and researcher subjectivities change over time, thus destabilizing identities and calling into question where and how to frame conversations. I reflect on bridging the gap between theoretical perspectives on the ‘margins’ and how inhabitants of a Delhi resettlement colony variously describe notions of liminality—from the metaphoric, to the geographic and to the social—over a prolonged ethnographic encounter. By bringing the temporal ‘journey’ of the researcher and interlocutor to the fore, I seek to open up a conversation on situated knowledges. More specifically, I ask how (and if) urban ethnographers can adequately capture shifting aspirations and feelings of in-betweenness, while grappling with one’s own responsibility to politically engaged research. Finally, I discuss the political relevance of evolving attitudes towards life on the margins, with implications for knowledge production and representation.

Date: 2017
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13604813.2017.1353344 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:cityxx:v:21:y:2017:i:2:p:207-218

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CCIT20

DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2017.1353344

Access Statistics for this article

City is currently edited by Bob Catterall

More articles in City from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().