Forever fields: studying knowledge practices in the global North: a view from the global South

ABSTRACT

While there is a multitude of academic work with respect to cross-border collaborations between South Asian countries and the US, almost all of it is produced by scholars located in US universities, either as tenured faculty or as doctoral students. Much of this work is predicated upon the access these scholars have to stakeholders in both countries, which is dependent on the predominantly one-way flow of gaze/theory from the global North. Based on in-depth interviews with Indian doctoral scholars enrolled in Women’s Studies and allied disciplines in universities in the US, but whose research fields are in India, this paper examines the ways in which coloniality structures the knowledges thus produced. Particularly, it examines how the construction of the ‘field’ is contingent upon complex processes such as visa regimes, funding opportunities to travel, and disciplinary framings. It argues that despite the increased focus on a globalised academia and movement of scholars and students around the world, material inequities continue to frame certain locations as ‘forever fields’. Finally, unpacking the politics of mapping a field, it poses the possibility of activating a disruption in the ways in which the category ‘field’ is perceived.

S'il existe une multitude de travaux universitaires sur les collaborations transfrontalières entre les pays d'Asie du Sud et les États-Unis d'Amérique, la quasi-totalité d'entre eux sont produits par des chercheurs établis dans des universités américaines, soit comme professeurs permanents, soit comme doctorants. Nombre de ces travaux reposent sur l'accès dont jouissent ces universitaires aux parties prenantes des deux pays, ce qui dépend du flux essentiellement unidirectionnel de regards et de théories provenant de l'hémisphère Nord. Sur la base d'entretiens approfondis avec des doctorants indiens inscrits en études féminines et dans des disciplines connexes au sein d'universités américaines, mais dont les domaines de recherche se situent en Inde, cet article examine la manière dont la colonialité structure les connaissances ainsi produites. Il examine en particulier la manière dont la construction du « domaine » est subordonnée à des processus complexes tels que les régimes de visas, le financement des possibilités de déplacement et les cadres disciplinaires. Il soutient que, malgré l'importance accrue accordée à la mondialisation du monde universitaire et à la circulation des chercheurs et des étudiants dans le monde entier, les iniquités matérielles continuent à faire de certains lieux des « domaines éternels ». Enfin, en décortiquant les dimensions politiques de la cartographie d'un domaine, il présente la possibilité de commencer à perturber la manière dont la catégorie « domaine » est perçue.

Aunque existen numerosos trabajos académicos que abordan la colaboración transfronteriza entre países del sur de Asia y Estados Unidos, casi todos fueron realizados por académicos de universidades estadounidenses, ya sea en calidad de profesores titulares o de estudiantes de doctorado. Ha sido posible por el acceso que tienen estos académicos a actores de ambos países, esto es, el país asiático de que se trate y Estados Unidos, en el que, a su vez, predominan una mirada profesional unidireccional y la teoría del Norte global. A partir de entrevistas en profundidad con doctorandos indios matriculados en estudios sobre la mujer y disciplinas afines en universidades de EE.UU., pero cuyos campos de investigación se encuentran en India, este artículo examina las formas en que la colonialidad estructura los conocimientos así producidos. En particular, investiga cómo la construcción del “campo” depende de procesos complejos, entre ellos, los regímenes de visados, las oportunidades de financiación para viajar y los marcos disciplinarios. Además, sostiene que, a pesar de la creciente atención prestada a la globalización del mundo académico y a la circulación de académicos y estudiantes por todo el mundo, las desigualdades materiales siguen determinando que ciertos lugares sean “campos eternos”. Por último, al desentrañar la política inherente a cartografiar un campo, plantea la posibilidad de activar una alteración en las formas de percibir la categoría “campo”.

KEYWORDS:

• Research ethics
• field
• feminist knowledge production
• global South
• feminist academia
• forever fields

Introduction

I’ll be coming home in summer to do fieldwork. Let’s catch up then.

As a PhD scholar in an Indian university researching the making and transnational travel of feminist knowledges between the ‘field’ in India and the university in the US, most conversations with my interlocutors ended with some version of this sentence. After an hour or more of online conversation that traced their journeys to universities in the US and their ideas of feminism, research, and politics, we wrapped up our conversation in the hope of meeting each other in person sometime in the near future. Due to circumstances beyond either of our control, more often than not, these meetings did not materialise. But, this sign-off stayed with me long after the conversations. The imbrications of time and space, the home and field, the possibility of an ‘us’ in a specific window of time opened up avenues of thought. It collapsed the traditional anthropological separation of the home as familiar and the field as a site of difference; home as the place of rest and the field as that of work. It also spurred questions about the social and political implications of fieldwork that are at play particularly when researchers located in the global North conduct research in the global South.

My doctoral work explores the ways in which knowledges travel by focusing attention on the figure of the Indian doctoral student engaging in feminist knowledge production in universities in the US. It engages with the ways in which questions articulated and explanations sought are informed by the site of enunciation that is the reconstitution and renarration of problems necessitated by the location (John 1996). Further, it examines the role that this location plays in securing legitimacy for the work produced – the researcher’s identity as ‘native informant’, someone intimately familiar with the context of their work and their simultaneous insertion into an imperialist institutional location – and, consequently, the negotiations involved in being accountable to two places situated within a hierarchical spectrum. In doing so, it explores the linkages between coloniality of knowledge production practices and that which is considered legitimate knowledge.

The coloniality of knowledge production practices are not just seen in relations between the global North university and the field in the global South, but is in fact the norm in knowledge production practices within most institutional structures and is replicated within the nation state and within different regions. Colonial knowledge production practices and neoliberal university structures¹ that emphasise productivity and impact, impel researchers to find accessible fields which allow for immersive fieldwork. In a bid to do this, we seldom pause to ask what makes a field accessible. Instead, we dive headlong into justifying why we are well suited to conduct the research we propose to conduct. We chart our familiarity with the field, we mark ourselves as insider-outsiders, a term so broad and encompassing that it can be fashioned to fit many identity locations. At best, in an attempt at reflexivity, we wonder how our identities impact our research; at worst, we make a laundry list of our identities and claim awareness of our relative privilege which is then supposed to serve as a stand in for reflexivity. What if instead we questioned what makes fields accessible?

Questions of how one maps a field have been a preoccupation long before I started work on this project. In my MPhil dissertation, I inquired into the practices and possibilities of Women’s Studies courses in non-metropolitan locations facilitating spaces of aspiration within academia and outside it. The field for this research was two Women’s Studies Centres in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu: my ‘home’ state. I was keenly aware of the easy access I was granted to study universities in non-metropolitan areas, because of my own location as a Women’s Studies student in an institute of national repute within a megametropolis, and, therefore, more privileged than my participants not just in terms of ascribed identity locations but also in terms of knowledge power. I spoke the local language (my mother-tongue, Tamil), and I tried to be as self-reflexive as possible in the writing of the research – reflecting on my class-caste positionality and how it differed from that of my research participants, and how this impacted everything, from my access to the field to how my research participants perceived me and I, them (Kanagasabai 2018). However, I was keenly aware of the inherent coloniality in this mode of knowledge production. It is the same location, in an Indian university of repute that now allows me access, however fraught or limited, to graduate students in the US.

In this article, drawn from my doctoral work, I turn towards the idea of the field in an attempt to explore the complex processes that are involved in constructing it both as a discrete site that is rendered knowable and that which establishes itself as a setting for the discovery of difference. I begin by looking at how social science scholars, in the process of migration, become legible within disciplines such as anthropology and area studies even if disciplinarily trained elsewhere while in India, and how this is one of the reasons why ‘fieldwork’ becomes a constituent element in their research. I then look at the collapsing of the home and the field and what this might mean for knowledge-power. In the past two decades, there has been a marked shift towards studying connections, collaborations, and mobilities within the global South in order to disrupt a binary narrative that pits the global North versus the global South (Niranjana 2000; Waetjen 2013). However, I argue that despite the relentless academic focus on heterogeneities and linkages within the global South, material inequities within academia continue to structure certain locations as ‘forever fields’. Finally, I ask if radically reimagining research methods and conceptions of the ‘field’ can contribute to democratising knowledge production.

Theoretical underpinnings

This section gestures towards certain key ideas and principles that have shaped the arguments that will follow. I begin by looking at literature on the politics of knowledge production and the colonial logics underpinning this. Subsequently, I consider the implications of the term global South and attempt to situate it with regard to knowledge production. I flag the ways in which a field is produced within specific sociopolitical conditions and, finally, I turn to examine the complex ways in which the home and field are imbricated in the case of the interlocutors of this study.

Knowledge production praxis

Knowledges are not abstract constructions. They emerge from social-economic realities, embodied practices, and labour processes. Sociologist Raewyn Connell, writing on the sociology of gender from a Southern perspective, draws on the powerful work of Beninese philosopher Paulin Hountondji (1997) to illustrate the hierarchical relationship between the global North and the global South thus:

The global periphery still exports data and imports applied science, the global metropole is still the centre of theory and methodology. An international circulation of knowledge workers accompanies the international flows of data, concepts and techniques. Workers from the periphery travel to the metropole for doctoral training, sabbaticals, conferences or better jobs; workers from the metropole frequently travel to the periphery to collect data, rarely to get advanced training or to learn theory. (Connell 2014, 555)

In the context of urban social movements, Leontidou (2006) writes of flâneur activists, borrowing from Benjamin (1999), as activists who are able to travel and congregate in various locations across the globe in ways in which those they represent or speak of cannot. Building on this, Cindi Katz² speaks of the flâneur academic to prompt questions on and problematise the politics of knowledge-making: what is theory, who is a theorist, who gets to travel and make knowledges, who is an expert and on what? She draws on her earlier formulation of counter-topographies as opening up possibilities of tracing common effects of macro-level processes across disparate places – geographical imagination that is simultaneously trans-local and transnational. She insists that even projects that are framed as co-production of knowledge within feminist transnational praxis – which involves doing ‘feminist work across cultural divides without ignoring differences or falling into cultural relativism’ (Grewal and Kaplan 1994, p.7) - need troubling.

Scholars have emphasised the need to continually examine the ways in which knowledges get produced, commodified, and restructured along market lines within neoliberal globalisation. Connell et al. (2017) argue that rather than focusing on ‘knowledge systems’ that bring with them alterity, closure, and fixity, it might be a more productive and enlightening exercise to focus on knowledge practices of intellectual workers and the institutional dimension of knowledge work. Narayanaswamy and Schöneberg (2020) similarly exhort scholars to unpack how their naturalised ideas of expertise and rigour are often framed by Western higher education and consequently how this can be exclusionary to certain kinds of knowledge and knowledge production practices. They go on to argue that an engagement with these discomfiting questions can allow us ‘to “know” the world differently’ (ibid., 8) and endeavour to work towards an ideal of epistemic justice. Taking off from these calls to examine the contexts of knowledge-making, this article explores what it means to create knowledges on the global South from within universities located in the global North and global South.

Whither the global South

Anne Garland Mahler (2017) notes that there are three primary ways in which the concept of the ‘global South’ has been understood. Firstly, within development organisations from within the Non-Aligned Movement, it emerged as an alternative to ‘Third World’.³ Secondly, it indicates spaces and peoples disadvantaged by capitalist globalisation and that which ‘means to account for subjugated peoples within the borders of wealthier countries, such that there are Souths in the geographic North and Norths in the geographic South’. She points out that this framing of the global South relies on a large body of work that focuses on spaces within the global North that ‘represent(s) an internal periphery and subaltern relational position’. Building on this, the third meaning of the term ‘refers to the resistant imaginary of a transnational political subject that results from a shared experience of subjugation under contemporary global capitalism’. In this paradigm, rather than being employed as a catch-all phrase to indicate geographies outside of North America and Western Europe or as a term that is indicative of the dispersed nature of those dispossessed by capitalist globalisation, the term global South is actively claimed to indicate the failure of globalisation as a hegemonic discourse and its unmaterialised promises (Lopez 2007). Mahler argues,

In this sense, the Global South may productively be considered a direct response to the category of postcoloniality in that it captures both a political subjectivity and ideological formulation that arises from lateral solidarities among the world’s multiple ‘Souths’ and that moves beyond the analysis of colonial difference within postcolonial theory. (Mahler 2017)

More recently, Banerjee defines the global South as a ‘non-place’ – a

deterritorial intellectual domain where, despite geopolitical obstructions, scholars find each other struggling to move on from the moment of (postcolonial/decolonial) critique and undertake the positive and experimental task of reassembling diverse philosophies and experiences of struggle from across the world. (Banerjee 2020, 3)

Drawing on these, in this article, I employ the term global South to gesture towards a place that occupies a peripheral location in knowledge hegemonies, while simultaneously activating the possibilities of this location. This work does not assume the global North/South to be ontologically stable categories, rather it seeks to argue that they materialise through the very discursive practices discussed herein – that it is in the very act of being identified as the ‘field’ whose datum needs to travel elsewhere to become legitimate knowledge that these identities are affirmed.

For instance, with this project I am read as a scholar from the global South studying people in the global North who are themselves also, from the perspective of the institutions that they work in and in terms of citizenship, read as being from the global South and doing research in the global South. These global South scholars in global North universities also face difficulties in being able to conduct research in other global North locations. For instance, Dixit (2021), a Nepali doctoral scholar in an American university trying to access archival records of Nepali Gurkha soldiers in the First World War, recounts the problems she encountered in trying to secure a visa to the UK. However, when read from the context of Indian universities, these are doctoral scholars in the global North, with greater access to resources – financially and academically, many of whom will continue to live and work in these global North sites, eventually becoming permanent residents or citizens of these global North nations (Zhao et al. 2023). This continual and contingent shifting of identities gestures towards their instability and the ways in which coloniality not only reinforces North–South dichotomies, but also reproduces social hierarchies within the South, and grades the knowledges produced thereof.

Thinking through the field

In their essay ‘Discipline and Practice: “The Field” as Site, Method, and Location in Anthropology’, Gupta and Ferguson (1977) trace the genealogies of the ‘field’ which is often imagined as pastoral or wild and in opposition to the urban and civilised. Unpacking the evolution of the discipline of anthropology alongside changing ideas of fieldwork, the detailed study of a limited area, they point out that the creation of a field site is an act of territorialisation influenced by multiple sociopolitical factors – from the vagaries of visa procedures to the interests of funding agencies, from contemporary academic discourse to personal preferences. Despite such factors, they highlight the curious uniformity in anthropological narratives of ‘stumbling upon’ the field, of discourses of chance, that they argue ‘prevent any systematic inquiry into how those field sites came to be good places for doing fieldwork in the first instance’ (ibid., 111). They call for, among other things, critical scrutiny into the ‘significant premises and assumptions built into the anthropological idea of “the field”’ that then inform or rather structure knowledge (re)production (ibid.).

Fieldwork is thought of as a gathering of anthropological or sociological data through an extended engagement with subjects in the field. Despite anthropology’s enduring colonial tradition of studying people and cultures who are distinctly ‘other’ and interactions in places that are located somewhere that is distinctly ‘elsewhere’ (Mughal 2015), there have been critiques of these practices from both within and outside the discipline. Over time, modes of ‘anthropology at home’ (Messerschmidt 1981) as a means to study social issues in one’s own ‘home’ in the global North, particularly in the US and Canada and, subsequently, ‘insider ethnography’ which often take place within frameworks of decolonising the production of knowledge and its inherent value, have become more common (Anderson 2021). However, as Greenhouse (1985, 261) points out, two assumptions underlie claims to doing anthropology at home: ‘first, that they are members of the local society which they investigate, and second, that their membership derives from their national citizenship’. Mughal (2015, 123) traces the rise of ‘anthropology at home’ due to funding organisations that require the involvement of local researchers in the projects, which stems from ‘the non-feasibility of Western (often coterminous with the global North) researchers to work on short-term and low-paid projects in areas with a security risk’. He further notes that doctoral candidates from non-Western countries studying anthropology in the West often carry out research either in their home countries or in their respective diasporas in the host countries.

Political theorists have critiqued the technologies of international mobility as ‘global mobility regimes of passports, visas’ (Salter 2006, 169) that differentially surveil and control bodies through biometrics and excessive documentation in order for them to be mobile and international. This in turn leads to differential access to academic and research opportunities for people from the global South. Unlike scholars with global North passports whose ‘fields’ can be anywhere, for scholars from the global South, the need for visas makes them less mobile and, consequently, more likely to continually come back ‘home’ in search of a ‘field’. This literature throws light on the institutional processes shaped by colonial hierarchies that often impel global South scholars to conflate the ‘home’ and the ‘field’.

A note on methodology

This article is an attempt at ‘studying up’ (Nader 1972) as it were, not simply as an ethical issue but also as methodological intervention. Starting with the premise that studying up entails studying the elite, Stich and Colyar (2015) emphasise the importance of conceiving elite status not as an always-already, but as a doing, a becoming. Priyadharshini (2003, 428) argues that while studying up imagines research subjects as powerful, one is ‘obliged to see their “hold” on power as the result of a combination of discursive factors and not as an unproblematic given’. It is this, she asserts, that allows what Sassen calls ‘excavations of the workings of power’ (Sassen 2000 as cited in Priyadharshini 2003), and opens up possibilities of conversation and change.

I consciously frame this as an exercise in studying up since the American university continues, to a large extent, to set the agenda for higher education elsewhere. Also, the idea that a tertiary degree from the West, particularly from the US, is better or more valuable than one from India, has moved from a space of public discourse into the state’s reimagining of the future of higher education.⁴ It is in this context that I place early career scholars in the US university who, due to their location and training, become more legible within academic networks of power, and due to historical and structural factors, seem to have better access to resources like archival material, knowledge guarded by copyright regimes, and the funds required to travel and pursue research, among other things. However, this does not foreclose my recognition of my interlocutors’ precarity within these structures – as immigrants in a time of hypernationalism, as workers who are struggling to unionise, or simply as students grappling with funding issues and unfamiliar institutional practices.

Through snowballing, I identified 17 research participants who are Indian students enrolled in doctoral programmes in the US, engaged in self-identified feminist research, and invested in India as a site for their research. Only five of them continue to be located in Women’s/Gender/Sexuality Studies, though many of them had received formal training, either a previous degree or a certificate course, in gender studies. A bulk of academic feminist work happens in departments other than Gender and Sexuality Studies or Women’s Studies. This is because of various reasons, including but not limited to, funding, appropriate research supervisors being located in other departments, or even due to lack of a gender studies department in the university in question. Therefore, I opened up my ‘field’ to include what might loosely be termed allied or cognate disciplines. These included Anthropology, Geography, Cultural Studies, and Media Studies, among others. Apart from three participants, all of them were located in what are known as R1 or Doctoral Universities that are engaged in ‘very high research activity’. I included participants from both public and private universities from varied geographical locations within the US.

Most participants made casual references to their identity as ‘middle class’ or ‘upper middle class’ – indicating their membership in a salaried class that is reasonably well off. At the time of the interviews, 16 participants identified as cis-women and one as non-binary. Thirteen participants identified as belonging to dominant caste locations, three participants identified as belonging to Dalit-Bahujan communities, and one person as belonging to a mixed caste identity. I give a collective picture of my interlocutors rather than drawing individual portraits to give the reader an idea about their location while simultaneously protecting their privacy.

The interlocutors were interviewed between 2018 and 2020. I conducted in-depth, open-ended interviews in English, which lasted between one and two hours. While most of the interviews happened online, I was able to meet with a couple of interlocutors in person when they came to India during the summer. I was able to interact with some interlocutors more than once, allowing for follow-up questions and deeper discussions on the contingencies of fieldwork. Most of these interviews were recorded and transcribed.

Field of study

To demonstrate the importance of the notions of field and fieldwork for the interlocutors, I begin by drawing attention to disciplinary hierarchies, especially for international students migrating for doctoral study. Most of the 17 interlocutors of this study had applied to an anthropology programme even though only one of them was academically trained in this discipline in India. Often the reasons cited had to do with familiarity with ethnographic methods and the availability of funding. However, it is also a matter of increased legibility of the scholarship of particularly international applicants within this discipline. Tarini,⁵ whose parents and sibling were also in academia, told me about how this had shaped her own aspirations in this space, and opened up about her long, and often fraught, journey of applying for graduate studies in the US:

For my MA thesis, I worked on sexuality and that is the work I wanted to continue with. The first time I applied to ten top universities, and the entire thing backfired on me. By the time I applied for the second time, I was convinced that if nobody is interested in this, I need to do something else [emphasis mine] … I had applied to the University of Michigan twice, for the Anthro programme and I was rejected both times. So even though the big school rejected me some of the slightly smaller ones accepted me. (Interview, online, 11 May 2018)

Tarini’s need to modify her research interests to something more attractive within US academia indicates how global South scholars are forced to alter their projects to be able to access global North institutions – the resources, funding, and visibility that come along with it. Universities are places of research, teaching, and learning, but also simultaneously structures that (re)produce, legitimise, and circulate academic knowledges, and as such tend to subscribe to a colonial logic of knowledge production. It also circles back to the idea that disciplinary location in doctoral study is often determined by possibilities of funding which render essential making feminist work legible not just transnationally but also transdisciplinarily. Furthermore, it is illustrative of the financial motives of disciplinary loyalties and betrayals. While researchers, especially from disciplines like Women’s Studies, often find themselves drawing on varied disciplinary methods and theories, a move into US academy meant a near unanimous turn towards Anthropology and South Asian Studies. Sharada, who is pursuing her doctoral degree in Childhood Studies said:

I was not very sure if I wanted to do this programme since I had not heard of this school or about the department of Childhood Studies. So, I was really sceptical of joining, and many people said I should go to Anthropology because with interdisciplinary courses, it might be difficult to find a job. (Interview, online, 28 October 2018)

In the Australian context, Crystal Abidin writes about how her interest in pursuing graduate studies in Gender was met with well-meaning advice from academics who pushed her to work towards ‘a degree with more mileage’ that would eventually translate into a wider array of job opportunities. She writes, ‘I learnt early on to re-narrativize the limitations of my desires as pragmatism, where it was pertinent to consider employability before, or at least alongside, intellectual pursuits’ (Abidin 2019, 78–9). She went on to pursue a PhD in the department of Anthropology and Sociology. As Brown (2017) so astutely points out, speculative value is used to rank not just universities, but also disciplines and scholars themselves.

In conversations, the word ‘field’ was used by the interlocutors to indicate both site of study and the discipline. For instance, Radhika, a doctoral candidate in Information Sciences who works at the intersections of gender, caste, and technology, gestured to the increased visibility of work done by Indian doctoral students within ‘fields’ such as South Asian Studies and Anthropology. Reflecting on her own disciplinary location and the labour that she needs to put in to be legible within that space she says:

If I could just focus on studying India and how gender operates in India, nothing like it. I wouldn’t have to do the extra work of making it relevant in the context that is removed from there …  I have found a community of people who are South Asianists, but my real fight is not there [in the discipline of South Asian Studies] … In the beginning I was like, what am I doing in this department [Information Sciences]? I should switch departments, just do this whole work without having to constantly defend my work to my disciplinary community but over time, I think some of the people in my own department who do this kind of interdisciplinary work, being in two places at the same time, have come to make me value the position I am in. It is not to say it is easy, right? (Interview, online, 11 November 2018)

Though only two of the 17 interlocutors were enrolled in an Anthropology department and none in South Asian Studies, most of them said they participated in seminars and conferences in both these disciplines, alluding to the increased visibility of their work within these fields. Tarini confirms that her ‘leanings in research have become much more anthropological than they once were’. These excerpts attest to the fact that the travel of scholars from the global South university is often accompanied by disciplinary negotiations that determine legibility within the global North university. The ‘anthropologisation’ of knowledge produced by scholars from the global South within global North institutions contributes to the othering of their theorisation, thus relegating them to the position of area experts rather than theorists in their own right.⁶ Consequently, this renders certain locations as simply places suitable for empirical research – as ‘forever fields’ – rather than places (and people) of theory too.

Mapping fields

Maps precede – and therefore produce – the territories they represent. They are calculative technologies that render space into territory, have historically contributed to the centralisation of knowledge in the Imperial Metropole, and have enabled rule at a distance. They are also the tools that delineate, name, and bound an expanse, legitimise a bounded territory as an entity, and consequently make it amenable to study. This article is an attempt to map the mapping (of the field), to map from an elsewhere (the global South university), and to map the ways in which the interlocutors of this study map their own journeys and places of engagement to reassemble notions of the field.

Valourising the ‘local’

At the time of conversation, most of the 17 interlocutors of this study had a clear idea of what constituted the field site and where it was located. Some had already completed a few rounds of fieldwork or had extensively planned their months-long field visits. While some of them specified a geographical location as their field, a few had a more dispersed field. Some had even finished the fieldwork component and had returned to the university to write their doctoral thesis. They were working on areas as varied as commercial surrogacy, online activism on sexual harassment, employment of technology in women’s empowerment, urban poor’s claim to land and services, and indigenous childhoods.

I asked my interlocutors how they imagined the field and their relationship to the field. Smriti, whose work centres on women residents of urban poor settlements and their collective struggles for tenure security, said her field was a neighbourhood in her home city. She was at the time of the conversation writing up her dissertation under the Department of Geography and said that it was important to her that the public university she was in had always been generous with both time and money, facilitating her many trips back to her field. She said:

Since the first year, I have been able to spend at least three months a year in Chennai focusing on fieldwork and being paid for the same. When the last floods happened in Chennai, I was in the middle of my teaching semester but I was able to take a few weeks off and fly to Chennai to work with the organisation. I helped them make reports to claim compensations from the state. So, in this arrangement, I always have one foot here and one foot there.

She saw herself not simply as a doctoral candidate but also as a scholar-activist who could broker not just state funding but also international non-governmental monetary support for underserved communities back home. Mapping the field within a development framework and the researcher as a scholar-activist allows the interlocutor to claim the field in vivo and generate ‘data’ longitudinally, both of which grant legitimacy to the research endeavour. Also, as Narayanaswamy (2014) demonstrates, such a valourisation of the ‘local’, and a conception of the ‘Southern’ feminist who is able to represent subaltern views in her own location, have increasingly become ‘hallowed signifiers’ (Spivak 1988 as cited in Narayanaswamy 2014) of inclusivity within a colonial development discourse.

Within an increasingly neoliberalised higher education (HE) scenario and highly bureaucratised doctoral processes in which ethical concerns are often treated merely as another item on the checklist, Millora, Maimunah, and Still (2020) reflect on the fraught nature of fieldwork which becomes even more striking when researchers from global North universities conduct research in the global South. They draw attention to how ‘geopolitical power asymmetries potentially lead to the transplanting of assumptions, norms and practices from northern institutions – through ethical requirements – into southern communities where these may not be applicable and even offensive’ (ibid., 12). They further argue that the insider–outsider binary fails to capture the nuances of negotiation that play out in the field and that it promotes an essentialised view of cultures.

Conducting research at ‘home’

While some candidates had the support of the university to be able to travel back and forth, for some of them ensuring this was possible meant endless grant applications. While familiarity with the field and the ability to ‘help’ research participants back home were commonly named as reasons for picking a field back home in India, only one participant acknowledged another important factor – funding. When asked about why she picked her field in India not only did she mention her previous research in the same field but also went on to state that it was only practical:

Like many students, I get funded for only nine months a year. So, the summer months, which is when we come back home, is mostly when fieldwork happens and during that time I have to financially make do with my savings. That money might not suffice for housing and other needs in the US, but here – I can stay at home and only need money for my fieldwork.

International candidates in the US have a cap of 20 hours of work per week to maintain visa status and cannot work outside campus. If international students choose to conduct research in the US, they often have to do so without funding – as most funding is for only nine months a year – thus incentivising international students to do research in their home countries.

Claiming ‘insider’ status

Research scholars from the global South are also sometimes actively discouraged from studying American contexts. For instance, Meena, who studies commercial surrogacy in India, said:

One of my friends wanted to work on child marriage and do a comparative study of the Indian and American scenarios. And while she was encouraged to study the Indian context, she was met with a lot of resistance from her supervisors when it came to studying the American context. This despite the fact that child marriage was legal in all states in the US until as recently as 2018 and still is in most states. They hinted that she might not be able to understand the context!

The interlocutor fumed that while white American students were allowed to study any ‘field’ of their choice, global South scholars were firmly placed within the native informant framework.

While the interlocutors questioned received ideas of field and fieldwork, they were keenly aware of the need to negotiate their identity as an ‘insider’ or at least someone ‘familiar’ with both, their research participants and the university, to gain access to the former and financial support from the latter. Reflecting on her location vis-à-vis her field, Radhika, who researching the employment of technological ‘solutions’ for women’s empowerment, says:

I mean, I think we all face ethical challenges of being in the field and extraction of knowledge from our participants in some ways. I do have to position myself as a local [emphasis mine] while interacting with my participants. And I don’t think that’s wrong. I understand that I am doing this research in an Ivy League university, and it has its benefits and I am very comfortable in doing what I am doing. I am very aware of that. But given a chance I’d rather do this research in India, frankly speaking, right? So, if I didn’t have the constraints that I did, I would identify as a researcher from India working with communities in India. I also try to think about it more in the sense of how can I bridge this distance. Funnily enough, one of the sites I work in is a very international site; even in India, it is a site where you have women coming from very different countries of the global South to participate in a particular programme. So, I feel like it’s not that difficult. I can very easily blend in. To them, I’m Indian. They don’t have to care about me being an outsider coming to do my thing. (Interview, online, 11 November 2018)

While acknowledging her position as a researcher from a ‘foreign’ university, Radhika insists that to her interlocutors, she is Indian. A few other interlocutors spoke about field site networks they had developed during their Masters’ research that they hoped to return to. Almost all my interlocutors had distinct geographical fields, sometimes located hundreds of kilometres away from their family home. It is also quite likely that they might have not collapsed the home and the field site while studying in universities in India. However, this conflation becomes a possibility from afar, in situations mediated by national boundaries, travel grants, and visa regimes.

The coloniality that constructs the field, particularly a location that is always-already a field – the ‘forever field’, is thus evident through the ways in which legitimacy for the scholarship is claimed – whether it is through valourising the ‘local’ through development frameworks, through funding and visa regimes that impel global South passport holders to conduct research at home, or through positioning oneself as an ‘insider’.

(Im)mobile scholars, forever fields

Clifford (1989) points out that the term travel has etymological links with the Greek term ‘theorein’ (origin of theory) defined as ‘a practice of travel and observation, a man sent by the polis to another city to witness a religious ceremony’. He begins with the idea of theory beginning and ending at home – the polis for the Greek theorist and Western discursive spaces – until the inception of postcolonial and feminist theorising in the 1960s and 1970s. He argues that, in the present scenario, one must engage with how theory travels: ‘How is theory appropriated and resisted, located and displaced? How do theories travel among the unequal spaces of postcolonial confusion and contestation? What are their predicaments? How does theory travel and how do theorists travel?’ (ibid., 85).

My own field of research for this study has been conceptualised unconventionally. For months, I wrote to mentors, friends, and acquaintances requesting them to connect me to prospective research participants. I messaged and emailed doctoral candidates I have followed on social media. I sent my abstract via email and sought Skype interviews with them. I scoured Twitter and Facebook for references to application and visa processes, fieldwork, and travel between home and university. For me, the digital screen became a site of research long before the pandemic necessitated it (Kanagasabai 2021). I spoke to my participants on Skype and transcribed my interviews by playing and replaying them. This was one way of studying research practices and cultures in translation between the field in India and the university in the US, which as a ‘field’ was inaccessible to me as a researcher in a global South university. While I could have applied for a grant that facilitated my travel to and stay in a university in the US and hope that I was found worthy of it, to me, the distance afforded me a point of view that was unlikely and generative. Unlike the valourisation of ‘distance to ensure objectivity’ that traditional anthropology emphasises, here I employ distance to highlight the impossibility of certain fields while simultaneously questioning the propensity of certain places to become ‘forever fields’.

The COVID-19 pandemic prompted extensive reflection on what it means to go to the field, and what it means to discover something there, or not. Geographer Catherine Oliver (2022, 84), writing about returning to fieldwork during a still-ongoing pandemic, parses the significance of nothingness in the field and posits that ‘Fieldwork is not just about produced knowledge, nor the process of production, but also about what is absent from the final form: about who is not in this space, what isn’t done, what can’t be found’. On a related note, Anne Guasco (2022) challenges the normative framework of fieldwork within geography by unravelling the colonial, ableist, and masculinist impulses that prop up and valourise ‘going there’. She instead argues, ‘An ethic of not going there is an ethic of not assuming that every place is and should always be accessible to you and for you’ (ibid., 472). These, if seen not simply as responses to contingencies but as exhortations to attempt complicating our relationship with knowledge production, can allow for more attention to epistemic justice.

For those of us in universities in metropolitan cities in India – the period between June and August when our semesters begin is often informally referred to as ‘lecture season’. This is when prominent scholars of Indian origin working in global North universities make their annual trip to India, presumably to visit ‘home’ but also to do ‘fieldwork’. They are often invited to universities here as keynote speakers and for special lectures. This is also the time aspiring graduate students are encouraged to meet with prospective supervisors. They are sometimes offered jobs as research assistants given their familiarity, again, not just with the discipline – but with the local language, the cityscape, and more often than not local networks. Often, this is a rite of passage before the student applies to the university, confident of having someone to ‘push their application through’.

For instance, Tarini spoke about her experiences after the first round of failed applications thus:

When I didn’t get in, I took up an NGO job in Pune. If I didn’t get in during the second time around, I would have just continued working in the NGO. I didn’t really have a Plan B. Luckily, at that point, I was working as a research assistant for a professor at UMich. I was doing field research in a Deaf school in Pune which is when I came across this prof’s work, and I immediately knew I wanted to work with her. In fact, I wrote to her and received a response within two hours, and soon I began assisting her with fieldwork. (Interview, online, 11 May 2018)

The professor eventually became Tarini’s doctoral supervisor. Tarini’s narrative illustrates how aspiring graduate students find supervisors by activating networks within ‘institutes of repute’ nationally, acting as research assistants to prospective supervisors conducting fieldwork in India – thus, in some ways already embedded in the native informant framework.

As academia becomes more globalised and there is increasing movement of scholars and students around the world, material inequities within academia continue to structure certain locations as ‘forever fields’. When asked about whether she intends to come back to India after the PhD, Sharada says, ‘I am mostly interested in coming back. I don’t know about doing research here, but my research area and field will always be India [emphasis mine].’ A well-established body of postcolonial feminist work cautions against homogenising women or feminisms (Mohanty 1991; (Spivak 1988), a homogenisation that is methodologically and definitionally performed as part of othering. Despite this, one continues to witness, in continuum, the homogenisation of the field or the home as field often to the same effect.

Majumder (2018), thinking with Spivak, asks, ‘What kind of world would it have to be for anthropologists not to have to travel across the world to get a degree, only to return home to find a field?’ I echo her sentiments and further ask what kind of world would it have to be for certain places to not just remain forever fields, but to be acknowledged as places of scholarship. The construction of a field is not merely an individual endeavour but one that is intimately shaped by visa regimes, funding opportunities to travel, and disciplinary framings, as has been demonstrated thus far.

Mine has been a fieldwork of interruptions. ‘Fieldwork’ for this dissertation has been interrupted by my location in a global South university and the resulting distance, funding (or lack thereof), and visa regimes; it has also been impacted by teaching schedules, fieldwork timings of my interlocutors, and technological interruptions – from power cuts to unstable internet connections. Simultaneously, it has been interrupted by health issues, moving between cities, personal losses, a global pandemic and its cascading effects. This is one way of looking it at. But, the more I thought about it, the more I realised that my research was not just interrupted by these ‘external’ conditions, it was forged/produced of these conditions. Here I think of condition both as state of something and as a situation that must exist before something else is possible. Each of these factors – whether it is my trying to juggle my teaching with my doctoral research, or the fact that much of my thinking and writing in this project happened during the pandemic, have made possible this research. Even as I am aware of the limitations of such fieldwork and writing, I risk it in the hope of activating a disruption in the ways in which the category ‘field’ is perceived.

Engaging with inherited and contested ideas of field and fieldwork, I have explored how early career Indian scholars located in global North universities continue to produce sanctioned knowledges, benefiting from resource-rich academic structures and networks while often simultaneously being relegated to being ‘area experts’. This then allows for the construction of certain spaces as forever fields – conducive to empirical research but rarely the site of theorisation. Concomitantly, by writing myself into the article, I have suggested that researchers working in and from global South universities, while comparably less privileged and less legible than their counterparts in global North universities, are also implicated, however differentially, in reinforcing the coloniality inherent in the imagination of the field. Finally, I contended that moving away from the credo of accessible fields that allow for immersive fieldwork could enable a subversive knowledge production praxis that interrupts colonial ways of knowing and works towards an ideal of epistemic justice.

While this paper focuses on the colonial continuities that animate the uneven geographies of research practice when scholars in global North universities work in fields in the global South, I do not claim that these power hierarchies are particular to this scenario. Rather, I assert that it is the knowledge power unevenness that characterises an area, a people, a site as a convenient and accessible field. If our attempt is to develop a decolonial feminist research praxis and repair epistemic injustices, then I suggest that destabilising received notions of the field could be an appropriate starting point. I conclude then with a set of provocations: What would it mean to study up, to question why certain spaces make for convenient fields? Why do some homes lend themselves as fields while some do not? Why do particular spaces continue to remain the field even when they are no longer home? Is it possible to map not accessible spaces as fields but spaces that are made inaccessible due to power hierarchies, and how would that impact the knowledge that is produced?

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dr Asha Achuthan, Dr Shilpa Phadke, Dr Lata Narayanaswamy, and Anandita Ghosh for their thoughtful and constructive feedback on this paper.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nithila Kanagasabai

Nithila Kanagasabai is a doctoral candidate in the Advanced Centre for Women’s Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India. Her areas of interest include: feminist media studies, feminist pedagogy, journalism studies, academic mobilities, research cultures, and digital media. Postal address: Advanced Centre for Women's Studies, School of Development Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, VN Purav Marg, Mumbai 400088. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 Neoliberalism is a worldview grounded in the principles of free markets, limited governmental intervention, meritocracy, and personal responsibility. In neoliberalism, the educational system’s primary purpose is to prepare students-consumers to be competitive in the global economy.

2 These arguments were made in an invited lecture at a workshop – ‘Urban Feminist Methodologies: A Workshop of the Urbanisation’ – organised as part of the Gender and the Global South: A Transformative Knowledge Network (GenUrb) Project funded by SSHRC, Canada and held at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, 28–29 September 2018.

3 The term Third World gained prominence during the Cold War and was used to refer to those countries not part of the first world – the capitalist, economically developed states led by the US – or the second world – the communist states led by the Soviet Union.

4 Following from the new National Education Policy, 2020, there is an increasing state-mandated focus on incorporation of ‘foreign-educated’ scholars into Indian universities through systems such as accreditation agencies, and national and international ranking of universities.

5 Names of research participants have been changed to protect their privacy.

6 This is exacerbated by citationary practices that require global South scholars to constantly cite and locate their work in relation to the global North. However, in-depth exploration of this is beyond the scope of this article.