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Showing posts from April, 2017

The field is not just data: Reflecting on cultural centering

1996. I began fieldwork in Jangal Mahal, among Santali communities experiencing disenfranchisement both materially and symbolically. As a scholar interested in health outcomes and community participatory processes for securing health, the lived experiences of community members with extremely limited access to health resources was an entry point for developing communicative spaces where community members could come together and articulate their health needs, and seek out a variety of material solutions for addressing these needs. Amid the extreme forms of marginalization, disenfranchisement from access to resources, discourses of resistance often appeared in community narratives as strategies for securing access to health. When these narratives of resistance took material form in 2006, I stopped writing about my field sites as a decision that seemed natural to one of the key tenets of the culture-centered approach: reflexivity. Reflexivity in this context meant that I ha

For a daughter.

When a daughter is just being a child, "Oh no, look at her. Intransigent. Needs to be disciplined." You tell me. When a son is just being a child. "This is how sons are, he is just being a child" You laugh.