This blog was written by SHABNAM, Senior Research Fellow (Ph.D., Scholar), Department of Teacher Training and Non-Formal Education (IASE), Faculty of Education, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.
“One can be lost in the field, fall in love, get frustrated, or go native.” (Kikon, 2020, p. 1).
This blog is a reflection of fieldwork conducted in September 2025, focusing on ‘measuring exclusion, discrimination and inequality’ in a Muslim majority slum in India. The reflection provides observations, reflexive positioning and related learning gathered during the site visits while also examining the experience of inequality connected to the wider structures of urban marginalisation, religion, gender and education and inclusion in everyday life contexts in the slum.
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The field site for this study was a slum referred to as ‘Noor Nagar’ (pseudonym) to protect the anonymity of the community. The site was a predominantly Muslim-majority informal settlement, characterised by narrow lanes, densely populated housing, inadequate sanitation, limited civic infrastructure and irregular water supply. A majority of settlement residents were engaged in low-paying jobs such as domestic work, street vending, daily wage labour, rickshaw pulling, tailoring, sanitation, etc. Limited access to quality education, employment and healthcare contributes to the vulnerability within the community, reflecting broader patterns of how marginalisation and religious identity are interconnected, reinforcing the negative stereotypes. This field shows that education inequality cannot be understood in isolation without comprehending everyday life in the community.
Accessing the field
My access to this field was made possible by the Charitable Health Centre (NGO), which has a long-standing relationship with people in this community, enabling a respectful and responsible entry. I was reminded that fieldwork is inherently not neutral. Access to the community was through relationships of trust, institutional legitimacy and existing power structures. If I had entered without their support, it could have been perceived as intrusive. I entered not just as a researcher but as a temporary participant in a shared social space, introduced through the health centre.
My positionality as a researcher
As a woman Ph.D. scholar, I approached the community (field) with an awareness of the dualities of proximity and distance. Although we shared the same religion, which could have fostered a sense of familiarity, my academic credentials and researcher status positioned me socially and institutionally outside the community. Further, I accessed the settlement through a gateway NGO, which placed me within a formal research setting. Consequently, my presence in the community was characterised by layered identities: woman, Muslim, scholar, urban resident and outsider.
My ability to engage with female residents within their domestic spaces was positively influenced by my gender, whereas my educational and institutional affiliations created subtle hierarchies. While I could freely move in and out of the community, the residents were structurally constrained and unable to disengage from structural precariousness. As such, shared religion did not eliminate the social distance that existed between us. Rather, it was class, geographical location and my academic mobility that played a much stronger role in shaping interaction within the field. As Katz (1994) argues, identities remain unstable and continuously negotiated during the fieldwork. Mankekar (2015) also states how fieldwork produces a form of ‘double vision ‘involving familiarity and engagement within the research encounter simultaneously. For me, fieldwork was not merely a place to collect data, but also a site of ethical self-reflection, where issues of identity, power and representation converged.
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Field reflection: Exclusion and inequality
When I reached the slum, it was raining. Water had accumulated in many of the streets. Although drains were not functioning properly, life continued without interruption. Women remained steady on their feet, lifting their saris slightly to walk through the mud and carried groceries or bags. In rainy weather, it is clear which spaces are planned and which are simply neglected. The built infrastructure in such areas affects the residents’ mobility, safety and sense of dignity.
The first extended conversation I had was with an elderly woman selling vegetables from the threshold of her home. Her doorstep was her shop. Tomatoes and green chilies were spread carefully on a cloth, despite the damp ground. I hesitated before asking questions. She looked at me for a moment and then said, half-smiling, ‘You people come to write. What changes for us?’
Her statement did not convey anger; rather, it reflected a broader issue in critical research discourse described as ‘parachute science’, in which researchers enter marginalised communities, primarily for data collection, without sustained involvement or meaningful social transformation. This interaction challenged my own positionality and compelled profound reflection on the representational politics, ethical responsibility and inherent limitations of fieldwork in marginalised settings.
In that moment, I realised that suspicion in marginalised spaces is not hostility, it is memory. Many researchers, journalists and officials have passed through. Data has been collected. Lives have been recorded. Yet meaningful change often remains slow, uneven or entirely absent.
I told her honestly who I was. I did not pretend to be a visitor buying vegetables. I did not claim to represent authority. I explained my research, my purpose and my limitations. She nodded. The conversation did not deepen immediately. But it did not end either.
Over the next few house visits, familiarity grew. Being a woman allowed me to sit inside homes, on floors where utensils were stacked against walls and bedding folded into corners. I noticed that one room changed its function throughout the day: kitchen in the morning, workspace in the afternoon, sleeping area at night. The same space also served as a children’s study area. As Unterhalter (2012) argued, educational inequality is deeply connected with unequal access to resources and social conditions that shape the learning opportunities.
This experience also highlighted for me the issue of epistemic justice in academia, where knowledge production is often shaped by privileged urban spaces and dominant epistemologies. In such settings, marginalised groups are often stereotyped, represented as deficit narratives. The fieldwork reminded me of the significance of representing participants not as passive or caricatures, but as people with complex lives, memories, emotions and forms of agency that often remain outside of the mainstream of academic discourse. It is important to represent them with dignity and humanity rather than through reductive stereotypes.
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One afternoon, while sitting inside a small room during a light drizzle, I noticed a child watching me write in my notebook. She asked, “Are you a teacher?” I smiled and said, “No, I am a student”. She looked surprised. In her imagination, education ended with authority. She could not imagine an adult as someone who still studies. In that exchange, distance and closeness coexisted. I was both accessible and distant. I shared gender and faith, but not the same material reality. There was also hesitation from some residents. One man, when approached for conversation, said directly, “Many people come. They all ask questions. What is the benefit?” I did not argue, I listened. I told him participation was voluntary. He eventually agreed to speak, not because he expected change, but because he wanted his experience recorded truthfully. Trust did not arrive dramatically. It accumulated quietly through sitting without rushing, through listening without interruption. In the evening, as the rain slowed to a drizzle, a group of women returning from domestic work stopped near the lane. They were laughing, despite the mud on their saris. One of them looked at me and said, “Now you feel like one of us”. It was said casually, but it carried weight. It did not mean I had become the same. It meant I was no longer only an outsider. Time blurred formal boundaries. Conversations extended beyond research questions to children’s schooling, rising prices, health worries and political frustrations. I was sometimes offered tea. Once, a young man insisted on offering me pickled vegetables without payment. I refused gently, but the gesture stayed with me.
Fieldwork slowly shifted from extraction to relationship. What I could offer was limited information, documentation and sometimes, connecting them with the NGO. Not power. Not structural transformation. That limitation was difficult. Research among marginalised communities is not only about access, but it also involves navigating expectations ethically. We become familiar enough to be trusted, but not powerful enough to solve structural injustice. That tension remains unresolved.
The field has taught me that being an insider or an outsider is never resolved. It shifts with interaction. Shared identity opens doors; structural difference redraws boundaries. When I eventually left the field, I knew the exit would not be easy. Anthropologists call it ‘leaving the field’, but the field does not leave you. It lingers in memory, in responsibility, in the quiet knowledge that behind every dataset are lives negotiated daily. This field visit gave me stories, time and trust. In return, I offered honesty. I entered with a notebook and questions. I left with humility. And perhaps the only promise I can make is that the trust participants extended to me shaped how I approached writing this reflection, compelling me to avoid reducing their lives to deficit narratives or treating their experiences merely as material for academic interpretation.
Concluding reflection
These images do not depict poverty as an event; rather, they show how the ordinary lives of women are shaped by their spatial location, and access to infrastructure. I found three things that stood out:
- First, infrastructure is not neutral; the lack of infrastructure or its fragility directly impacts women’s work.
- Second, the home is at the same time a place where people live and a place where people work; thus, the home functions as a base for the informal economy, which relies on feminised labour to sustain itself.
- Third, educational opportunity is closely tied to the physical environment; a child’s ability to learn is directly related to the physical stability of her/his learning space (i.e. school), the level of safety they experience, and the availability of materials with which they can study.
My fieldwork experience forced me to confront my own comfort with abstraction. While statistical analysis will identify patterns of inequality, the lived space of a community will expose the texture and weight of those patterns. The rain, which we initially saw as creating vulnerability in the community, really revealed what was already there. The statistics may categorise the vulnerable population within a community, but it is the daily lives of those individuals that negotiate their vulnerability, particularly for women. The field experience was not simply about collecting data; it required a high degree of attentiveness, reflexivity, and ethical responsibility.
Ethical clarification
All photos used were obtained with the informed consent of all participants.
Acknowledgement
The author expresses sincere gratitude to the NGO facilitating access to the field. The author is also deeply thankful to all the participants for generously sharing their experiences and time during the field visit.
