“Daughter” as a positionality and the gendered politics of taking parents into the field

• Main Authors: DE SILVA, Menusha, GANDHI, Kanchan
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2019
• Subjects: Accompaniment; gender; India; knowledge production; positionality; Sri Lanka; Asian Studies; Human Geography; Models and Methods
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3030; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/4287/viewcontent/101111_area12525.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Research on gendered politics of the field has delved into the practices of accompaniment and its implications on research and knowledge production, particularly through the case of researchers’ children and partners. In comparison, the tendency to seek assistance from parents is neglected within the scholarship. Drawing on the PhD fieldwork experiences of two researchers in their “native” country, specifically a Sri Lankan researcher conducting fieldwork in Sri Lanka and a North Indian scholar researching in South India, the paper reveals parents’ contribution to the research process, in terms of enhancing researcher credibility, facilitating contact‐making and access, and providing emotional and practical care. The discussion illuminates two aspects of parents’ involvement in fieldwork: (1) how the unique nature of parent–child relationships shapes the research process at multiple stages, and (2) how the gendered notions of knowledge production result in parents’ contributions being typically unacknowledged. The paper emphasises that a researcher's positionality as a daughter shapes her ability to navigate gendered field sites in her “native” country and is implicated in the wider research process.