‘We are your brothers, we will know where you are at all times’: risk, violence and positionality in Karachi^*

* The names of all field respondents have been changed to protect their privacy.

ABSTRACT

This article foregrounds some of the challenges and risks involved in fieldwork in what is often perceived as a contested and violent political environment. In conducting an ethnography of public spaces in Karachi's inner city, I frequently encountered risky situations. These led to a critical examination of popular and normative discourses around risk and violence. Using this critique as a foundation, I examined aspects of my positionality that either hindered or aided my fieldwork – namely gender and ethnicity. Thus in this article, I explore how my own ethnic and gender identity both foreclosed as well as created opportunities in the field while at the same time examining how risk and violence need to be constantly reconceptualised and reframed. These two levels of critique, one practical and the other conceptual, provide a useful vantage point to re-evaluate our role as ethnographers in contested environments.

KEYWORDS:

• Methodology
• urbanism
• ethnography

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their extremely useful comments and suggestions that aided significantly in improving this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Sarwat Viqar is a faculty member in the Department of Humanities, Philosophy & Religion at John Abbott College in Montreal. Her research focuses on urban politics and forms of informal urban governance. Her research area is South Asia, in particular Karachi, and her doctoral dissertation was an anthropological study of forms of informal neighbourhood governance and sovereign arrangements in Karachi’s inner city quarters. She has also worked as a consultant for the IDRC (International Development Research Council, Canada) supported project ‘Gender and Violence in Urban Pakistan’ as part of the SAIC (Safe and Inclusive Cities) program. She has published articles on Karachi's urban history, the dynamics of its low-income neighbourhoods and fieldwork methodology.

Notes

* The names of all field respondents have been changed to protect their privacy.

1 Gayer, Karachi: Ordered Disorder.