Tag: feminist research

Field Notes from Rajja Days: On Rest and Recovery for Migrant Construction Workers in Bengaluru

Vineetha Nalla November 11, 2026
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Rain came down hard as we sheltered beneath the layers of tarpaulin that formed the roof of a small jhopdi (a makeshift hut made from inexpensive or scrap materials like wood, metal sheets and plastic) in one of Bengaluru’s informal settlements. Bengaluru, the capital city of Karnataka in southern India, is home to numerous such settlements where migrant construction workers live and work. After days of oppressive heat in August, it finally rained, and within minutes rivulets formed along the mud pathways between the jhopdis. I was accompanied by Radha, a grassroots worker involved in housing and labour rights advocacy for migrant workers, who often assists me with translations in the field. We were visiting the settlement on a Sunday, a rajja day for our regular follow-up conversations. Rajja means a day off, and while rajja can be any designated day of the week depending on the workers’ schedules and employment arrangements, in this particular settlement Sunday served as rajja day. This settlement is one of the several field sites I continue to visit as part of my ongoing doctoral fieldwork with migrant construction workers in Bengaluru. (read more...)

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How to Create Figurations and Inhabit Feminist STS Research: A DIY Manual

Clarissa Reche October 17, 2024
Este conteúdo também está disponível em português.
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For some time now, my colleagues and I at Labirinto (Labyrinth, Laboratory of Socio-anthropological Studies on Technologies of Life, State University of Campinas, Brazil) have been discussing and practicing feminist ways of doing academic research. For us, this goes far beyond prioritizing feminist readings. That’s important, but we’re trying to build practices that are articulated with what we believe politically and what we want for the university and the world. One important point is to create a welcoming working environment based on careful personal interactions that avoid as much as possible reproducing the classist, racist, and misogynist ways of working that are so common in the academic power structure. Another point is to think about how we can experiment with methodological proposals that are open to difference. Figuration, especially in Donna Haraway’s proposals, is one such experiment. This is a do-it-yourself manual on how to create figurations and inhabit feminist STS research. It is the result of these discussions in the Labyrinth, and also of my doctoral thesis. (read more...)

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Who Knows About Ethical Research?: Reflections on Research Ethics and Vulnerability in Abortion Research

Lea Happ March 5, 2024
Este contenido también está disponible en español.
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People who have abortions are often thought of as inherently vulnerable. When retold without nuance, this narrative can be harmful to abortion-seekers, as well as to reproductive autonomy more broadly, since it reinforces negative stereotypes about abortion and abortion-seekers. Changing affective paradigms around abortion has been a key concern for feminist activists around the world. In fact, a significant part of my ongoing PhD research on pharmaceutical abortion, healthcare access, and feminist activism in Argentina is concerned with how and why feminist activists seek to disrupt the social perception of abortion as intrinsically being a certain kind of experience—tragic, shameful, vulnerable, to give just a few pointers. While preparing for my data collection, I was struck by the discrepancy between how feminist activists who accompany abortions conceptualise the agency of (potentially) vulnerable abortion-seekers and my UK university’s research ethics committee’s approach to it. Especially given my own positionality as a non-Argentine PhD student, this prompted me to reflect on the challenges of navigating this divide when researching feminist activism and self-managed abortion. To this end, I unpack some of my reflections while trying to balance my duty of care for potentially vulnerable participants with respect for their agency. Striking this balance can be especially complicated when the understandings of both risk and ethical practice diverge between ethics committees, who—to a certain extent have to—adopt a universalist approach, and feminist practitioners holding contextually specific expertise on the subject, while also frequently working with different definitions of care. This divergence is even more pertinent in the case of abortion, an experience steeped in assumptions based on moralised and medicalised social and political discourses. Throughout my research process, I have understood refusing to reproduce such paternalistic discourses as essential to doing ethical research, alongside attending to potential vulnerabilities. (read more...)

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