The Centre for Policy Research (CPR) invites you to a talk on:
Fieldwork and Sexuality Research in India: Identity and Political Economy in a Shared Frame
Speaker: Svati P. Shah, Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, University of Massachusetts and Research Associate, University of Pretoria
Wednesday, 15 February 2023, 11 AM IST onwards. The event will be held in the CPR Office Conference Room (Dharam Marg, Chanakyapuri, New Delhi)
Abstract of the talk
This paper draws from that period in every ethnographic research project in which the researcher looks for the perfect ethnographic fieldsite. This is a ubiquitous but undertheorized phase in ethnographic research usually excised from critiques and often relegated to a period prior to the actual research process. The paper argues that the quest for the site is critical to doing ethnography because it is the method by which the ethnographic gaze produces ‘the fieldsite’ as a discursive space from an emplaced location. This reading of sociality in ethnography moves beyond the reification of the ethnographic encounter, which rightly exhorts the ethnographer to read herself into the research frame. This perspective on fieldwork has significant implications for research that aims to account for structural forces while including questions of sexuality, which present themselves as individuated and singular. The talk discusses ways to address this issue for policy research.
About the speaker
Svati P. Shah is an Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and a Research Associate at the University of Pretoria. They are a cultural anthropologist who works on the imbrications of sexuality, gender, migration, political economy and social movements in India. Their first book was Street Corner Secrets: Sex Work and Migration in the City of Mumbai (2014). They serve on the Editorial Board of Feminist Anthropology.
