I began my doctoral journey right before the pandemic set in. My project was going to critically examine the notion of “technology for social good” within the hyper-charged tech startup and innovation ecosystem in a rapidly digitizing India. I wanted to examine how top-down imaginaries rooted in technocratic governance regimes were shaping emerging communities of practice and cultures of technology-based entrepreneurship. Deeply inspired by Ho’s (2009), Irani’s (2019), and Gupta’s (2024) ethnographies, I hoped to develop my research similarly through an in-depth investigation of techno-entrepreneurial cultures from within and examine their capture of the public imagination for charting pathways to economic growth and social mobility. The idea was to try and uncover the finer threads that were weaving the tapestry of neoliberal development in what would later be deemed as “pre-pandemic” India. Enter the pandemic and the paralyzing lockdown in March 2020 that brought “normal” life to a screeching halt. A sudden and totalizing isolation was mandated by the social distancing rules meant to keep the virus out. However, it didn’t keep the feeling of disaster at bay. The scenes that unfolded during the lockdown–on national television and social media screens, both closer to home as well as globally–demanded loudly and aggressively a reconsideration of everything important and urgent, and hence, worth studying.
The shift to remote working dashed my grand plans of doing “immersive” fieldwork in a tech startup. Instead, I was left grappling with the daunting “new normal” of the pandemic and figuring out how to do a “good” ethnography in the middle of a public health crisis while “staying safe at home.” The university was only accessible digitally. Funding was precarious and scarce, as academic institutions in India scrambled to reorganize bureaucratic systems and processes for disbursing scholarship funds. Not having received a stipend for the first 6 months of the program made it immensely difficult to conceive “in-person” fieldwork by embedding myself physically in a particular context. This also meant that I had to move back home, and living in a patriarchal social environment came with its own set of challenges. Meanwhile, the image of ethnographic fieldwork in my mind– “traditionally” embedded and grounded in a bounded socio-spatial context–became hazier as urban centers, where startup ecosystems were largely based, seemed increasingly inaccessible. Physical participant observation thus appeared impractical to pursue.
A delivery person riding on his bike, driving past a prominent public spot in Hyderabad. Image by author.
Methodological Reconfigurations in “Corona-times”
As the pandemic pulled focus to far more urgent issues, the central categories of my research– technology, entrepreneurship, and social good–came unraveled. However, I observed that these objects were also being rehashed. The government proposed techno-solutionist interventions like Aarogya Setu and other self-testing and contact tracing apps to manage the pandemic, without adequate privacy safeguards or regulations to protect users (Saxena 2020, Nair and Bedi 2020, Bedi and Sinha 2020). Entrepreneurial initiatives and risk-taking that motivated acts of “care heroics” were widely lauded (Bhatia 2021), while more systematic responses to the pandemic were sidelined with frontline workers and essential service workers (including gig workers) struggling to receive recognition and protection (Srivastav et al 2020, Nair 2020). Structural inadequacies–as usual–remained unaddressed and severely under-discussed. Given the normative conditions of restricted mobility, pervasive institutional panic, and my personal (and political) commitments, I had to quickly reorient myself to new contexts and think “with” heterogeneous fragments. Threading them together, I began to rework my research at a different spatial scale–the urban–where dynamics between these categories were unfolding differently and being made anew. In 2021, I moved to Hyderabad, a major metropolitan city in the south-central India, to move closer to the university. I adapted my research questions to the urban reality I came to inhabit during the second wave of the pandemic. Locating these new entanglements between technology, entrepreneurship, and social good in the urban geography of Hyderabad, I started noticing the transformation of entrepreneurialism from an externalized cultural reality to an internalized one. Soon, I realized that digital technologies, particularly app-based platforms, were heavily implicated in this.
To remedy the limitations of physical participant observation during the pandemic, I planned to use a combination of multi-sited and digital ethnographic approaches. Through flexible yet immersive methods, I wanted to generate a grounded account of the pandemic and demonstrate how the objects I followed across multiple sites were being reconfigured therein, allowing my research to offer a “view from somewhere” (Haraway 1988) to comprehend the crisis and adaptations to it in urban contexts. However, the pandemic also intensified the transience of the objects of my study, and I felt the need for a methodological approach that helped account for this meaningfully and generatively. While rewriting my research proposal in 2021, I stumbled across patchwork ethnography, an approach that crucially anchored my fieldwork. I was fascinated and invigorated by the many intellectual possibilities it opened up for (re)imagining ethnographic work.
Interrogating critically the separation between the field and the home, Günel, Varma, and Watanabe’s (2020) ‘Manifesto for Patchwork Ethnography’ advanced feminist epistemological agendas. They insist that knowledge production practices and regimes should account for researchers’ inner lifeworlds more fully in the process of doing research, as uncertainties increasingly govern mobility, interpersonal interaction, and participation in the field. This, in their opinion, was made particularly salient by the pandemic upending many a fieldwork plan, thus creating the urgent need to account for the “personal” more centrally in reconfiguring ethnographic work. Leveraging the opportunity created by the crisis, for reorienting and restructuring academic practices, they asked how, in a moment of pervasive uncertainty, researchers can “transform realities that have been described to us as “limitations” and “constraints” into openings for new insights” (ibid). I too began to see my fieldwork as patchworked then, gathered from the fragments of my lived experience as a student, urban resident, and ethnographer – exploring aspects of urban life through coursework assignments; discovering and familiarizing myself with its history through archival excursions; tracing various contours, flows, and rhythms; engaging with life on the margins and peripheries while conducting fieldwork in informal settlements and gated enclaves; all the while interacting with (and through) offline and online worlds crucial for navigating, accessing, working, and making a life in the city.
A Patchworked Response to the Pandemic
Patchwork ethnography pushed me to think about “what counts as knowledge and what does not, what counts as research and what does not” (ibid). Extrapolating from this, I began to perceive the diminishing separation between field and home during the pandemic as productive rather than constraining. Acknowledging the home as a site for work has always been a contentious matter, as countless feminist struggles over the years have demonstrated (Federici 1975). But reading the manifesto bolstered my anthropological imagination to explore these tensions in tandem with digital platforms and examine their domestication and labor-saving potential (Cowan 1993).
In the pilot stage, I examined home-based mutual aid efforts wherein the home was a site for critical and life-saving interventions during the pandemic. I had moved to a gated community in a neighborhood on the outer periphery of Hyderabad. There were many recently established home-based businesses in the community, often run by entrepreneurial women, that came into sharp focus for me as sites where entrepreneurial rhetoric had been greatly normalized. In an interview with Tanya (name changed), a resident of the community and the admin of a WhatsApp group for home chefs, I got a glimpse into the ethos that drove many of these women. She emphatically declared the importance of entrepreneurship and the necessity to inculcate these skills in children from a young age, while talking about a community event where she encouraged her children to run a stall and sell some of her home-made products. Several women like Tanya were becoming a part of the digital economy, running small enterprises through WhatsApp groups and social media platforms like Instagram, including selling home-cooked food, clothes, used commodities, engaging in influencer marketing, and so on.
While documenting and examining their experiences of organizing a community-based mutual aid intervention through a WhatsApp group during the second wave of the pandemic then, I wondered if these women were enacting their “own ideas of social good” (Irani 2019). They used platforms like Trice, Swiggy, Zomato, and Dunzo, for organizing the delivery of cooked food to quarantining patients, often involving coordinating with gig workers employed by these platforms. Later, I realized that the socio-spatial context of the gated community as an enclaved residential compound, its location in the city, its sociocultural and demographic makeup, and its proximity to the IT sector – all contributed to the overwhelming presence and rapid growth of digital platforms in the neighborhood. I could also see that these platforms were reconfiguring collective life not just in this neighborhood but across urban contexts. Doing fieldwork in “bursts” and deeply interspersed with everyday life, I documented many such disparate responses to the pandemic, often articulated through digital platforms and demonstrating entrepreneurial logics, providing a window into a new form of networked collectivity emerging in the wake of the pandemic.
To briefly consider the role of the window, I refer to Kanagasabai’s (2021) description of the screen as a crucial site for conducting research at a distance and for producing a body of scholarship that seeks to reverse the gaze. I similarly consider the window as a critical site for doing research in constrained circumstances by enabling access to the field partially. Whether it was physically witnessing residents’ lives through windows and balconies (from my own) during the lockdown, or virtually glimpsing into them while scrolling through posts, stories, reels, and threads on social media platforms–rendering the phone as a window to access the world–the window became a salient socio-material artifact that shaped my research. It was through physical and digital windows that I collected patches and fragments of “data”. Offline, windows were an antidote to isolation and physically distanced community living. Online, smartphone application windows were a methodological tool to traverse digital worlds, to discover and participate in social landscapes that had been rendered inaccessible by the pandemic. These modes overlapped, too. While being physically embedded in a particular neighborhood in the city, I embedded myself within social networks linked to my immediate socio-spatial context as well as others encountered in the course of tracking emerging responses to the pandemic. These ethnographic excursions to various sites of relief work in the city, both digital and physical, helped assemble and analyze the provisional and patchworked crisis response. Volunteers’ narratives across these diverse groups, for instance, consistently highlighted the broader infrastructural gaps that made civilian relief efforts necessary. These methods, eventually, also enabled a patchworked and partial understanding of urban life, its contingent shifts, and other emerging issues in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis.
Conclusion
My research has been a culmination of witnessing, participating, and archiving otherwise invisible acts of care, hopeful experimentation, and provisional collaboration that enabled urban survival in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Paying attention to provisional and patchworked modes of response, and offering a partial yet grounded view, created a critical vantage point to examine the evolution of platformisation through different phases of the pandemic and beyond. Auto-ethnographic curiosities about the normalization of digital platforms for accessing necessities during the pandemic led me to ask what exactly was being platformised. In a moment of urgent need, digital platforms became infrastructures for crisis response. But after the urgency of the crisis dissipated, they persisted and assumed infrastructural functions in everyday urban life. As the pandemic receded, a critical perspective on platformisation meant paying attention to the labor politics underlying platform work and attending to gig workers’ attempts to collectivize and build worker power against extractive platform firms. Simultaneously paying attention to the appropriation of entrepreneurial rhetoric by tech corporations who owned these platforms and claimed to work for public good, brought into focus the marginalization of the “innovators’ others” (Irani 2019)–gig workers who serviced the enclaved lifeworlds of gated communities by risking their own lives during the pandemic. As a critical researcher-user on these platforms, it became necessary to critique their modes of operation and foreground workers’ experiences and everyday realities. Engaging with gig workers’ attempts to mobilize and resist the precarious livelihoods created by rapid platformisation in Indian cities has since crucially informed my research.
In conclusion, I reiterate that a partial view does not connote incompleteness. Rather, it signifies the importance of generating transversal relationships and “partial connections” (Strathern 2004) that extend spatiotemporally, beyond immediate social contexts. Such transversal relationships are crucial for generating long-term links with places and sustained engagement that leaves room for iterations and improvements in research. Patchwork ethnographic approaches also align with southern urban practices (Bhan 2019). I hope to visibilise these sutured urban realities by deploying patchworking as an overarching framing for my research, “make visiblise the seams” of urban life and how it is “sutured” (Simone 2004) in novel ways.
This post was curated by Contributing Editor Nishanth Kunnukattil Shaji
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