D Chawla
Biographic Data
| ID | 47063 |
|---|---|
| NAME | D Chawla |
| GIVEN NAMES | D |
| FAMILY NAME | Chawla |
| SIGNATURE | CHAWLA D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Ohio University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9785-3525 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 67 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 17 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
The Grave
This essay came into being in walking, remembering, thinking, and talking about my relationship to graves. In winter 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic began, a compulsive walker, I found myself venturing further away from home in my walks. Walking in small-town America means you inevitably encounter cemeteries where the local dead rest. Indeed, cemeteries are an intrinsic part of rural and urban landscapes. As I walked, watched the landscape, and a…
Perempuan Adat dan Kemiskinan
This article stems from my experience of conducting ethnography on indigenous Dayak Benawan women in West Kalimantan for approximately two years. Documenting the experiences and knowledge of indigenous Dayak Benawan women was a challenge for me as a researcher, a man, and part of the Dayak Benawan people. Reflection on field data reveals that indigenous women of Dayak Benawan experience multiple oppressions of poverty, starting from the family sy…
Poems, Routes
In March 2020 when the pandemic began, I found myself walking and scribbling in my notebook around the hills, country roads, and backroads of the Appalachian college town where I live and work. In the absence of human presence, I turned my attention to the nonhuman and the inanimate. Ultimately, my scribbles about these things took poetic form. I present here four poems and some notes on their emergence. They are a voice for the “tiny thoughts” t…
The Second Shift as Epistemological Bonus
In 2004, when I first entered the ranks of tenure-track faculty, I knew there were three tasks that I was expected to perform as a central part of my job: teaching, research, and service. To be clear, this is the expectation of work from tenure-track faculty—only the percentage of time spent on each area differs across institutions. Since I was hired into a PhD granting program, I was fully aware that publishing was critical to my tenure and prom…
Diversity Work as Second Shift
If you follow intellectual trends in popular and academic Western feminism(s) about the labor that women perform in the home, then the phrase the second shift is almost pro forma. It was popularized and entered general parlance after the 1989 book by the same name published by Arlie Hochschild1 whose rigorous interview study with fifty married couples led her to coin this phrase. The second shift stands for the unaccounted and unpaid labor that w…
An Extra-Ordinary Critical Intervention Forum
In summer 2019, the field of communication studies imploded, owing largely to a controversy surrounding the yearly Distinguished Scholar Award presented by the National Communication Association (NCA). Of the 80 awardees from the past three decades, only one was an academic of color. My field was a few decades delayed in its rage over this obvious display of structural racism and bigotry, but the rage was overwhelmingly welcomed. As a card-carryi…
The Essay
A found object might bring sorrow or delight, but a lost object presents a question mark. Its absence can feel like a cleave, a permanent one, in our memory. Absences inevitably lead us to quests. In this personal essay, which is linked with a larger writing project on family and material memory, I search for the contents of an “essay” written by me when I was ten years old, on the very day that India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinat…
Borders and Margins
I have a particular intimacy with borders. An intimacy that I inherited, but did not seek. My family history is a history of belonging and unbelonging across borders. In August 1947, my grandparents, generationally rooted to the Deraghazikhan region of Pakistan, suddenly found that their country was no longer theirs. I want to imagine what that might have felt like. You wake up one morning and find that your country is free of almost 200 years of…
Migrations
Editorial handovers are migrations that signal and embody movement, transition, and transformation. To attend to, and indeed to salute this shift as I launch my editorship of Departures in Critical Qualitative Research—what I am framing as an editorial migration—I present to the readers the first of a curated double issue that focuses on migration and its attendant features, borders, and margins. I begin this introductory essay by enacting my own…
Introduction
Can there be a decolonial autoethnography? If so, what could such an autoethnography look, sound, and feel like? If the possibility of decolonizing this mode of knowing does not exist, then what are the impediments-discursive, material, political, social-that disallow a move to decolonized autoethnographic work? Where would decolonization take us? What does it mean to write the self in and out of colonial historical frameworks? In this special is…
The Migration of a Smile
Bodies travel. Bodies travel geographies. Bodies perform geographies. Geopolitical migrations are the subject of much writing, performing, and debate in contemporary scholarship. In this piece, I trace the migration of an affect that sits in the liminal space between the body and the stories it tells. The smile. I ask: How does a smile migrate? What does habitat and geography have to do with this mundane expression brought onto the body as an “or…
My History of History
Rooted in the conceptual and received notion that personal histories are necessarily imbricated in larger historical, social, and political narratives, “My History of History” is a performance forum that engages individual and collective responses to pivotal historical moments. Each of the ten auto/historical performances featured here seeks the liminal space between the personal and the political to ask and answer the following questions: How do…
Habit, Home, Threshold
This essay is an experiment that attends to the habit of tea as both subject and object. A coalescence of habit as threshold as home. In an assemblage of encounters, I hear, I sense, I smell, I taste, and I show how my habit (of tea) is a trestle—both a transport and a transaction in which I arrive and depart multiple times, every day. Consider these words a kind of searching (and finding), a cartographic tracing, a constellation—of habit, of hom…
Between Stories and Theories
Subjectivity and the 'Native' Ethnographer
In this conversation, the author's goal is to discuss subjectivity/s as evolving and temporal representational emergences in ethnographic fieldwork. She uses her participation in a narrative ethnographic study of women's experiences in Hindu arranged marriages to show how her positions traveled and constantly shifted in the years of fieldwork. Ultimately, she shifts focus to her fieldwork and explores the ways in which her co-participants shifted…
The Bangle Seller of Meena Bazaar
Enabling Reflexivity in a Mentoring Relationship
This essay enacts a performance space in which the authors explore (an) "enabling" reflexivity through reconstructed conversations and a dialogic metanarrative about their evolving relationship as doctoral student and advisor. They narrate turning points, setbacks, and triumphs that show their struggles to evolve as intellectuals deeply committed to embodying the beneficial interrelations among their public and private dialogues. Their goal is to…
Introduction
Can there be a decolonial autoethnography? If so, what could such an autoethnography look, sound, and feel like? If the possibility of decolonizing this mode of knowing does not exist, then what are the impediments-discursive, material, political, social-that disallow a move to decolonized autoethnographic work? Where would decolonization take us? What does it mean to write the self in and out of colonial historical frameworks? In this special is…
Subjectivity and the 'Native' Ethnographer
In this conversation, the author's goal is to discuss subjectivity/s as evolving and temporal representational emergences in ethnographic fieldwork. She uses her participation in a narrative ethnographic study of women's experiences in Hindu arranged marriages to show how her positions traveled and constantly shifted in the years of fieldwork. Ultimately, she shifts focus to her fieldwork and explores the ways in which her co-participants shifted…
Enabling Reflexivity in a Mentoring Relationship
This essay enacts a performance space in which the authors explore (an) "enabling" reflexivity through reconstructed conversations and a dialogic metanarrative about their evolving relationship as doctoral student and advisor. They narrate turning points, setbacks, and triumphs that show their struggles to evolve as intellectuals deeply committed to embodying the beneficial interrelations among their public and private dialogues. Their goal is to…
The Bangle Seller of Meena Bazaar
Between Stories and Theories
Enabling Reflexivity in a Mentoring Relationship
This essay enacts a performance space in which the authors explore (an) "enabling" reflexivity through reconstructed conversations and a dialogic metanarrative about their evolving relationship as doctoral student and advisor. They narrate turning points, setbacks, and triumphs that show their struggles to evolve as intellectuals deeply committed to embodying the beneficial interrelations among their public and private dialogues. Their goal is to…
Subjectivity and the 'Native' Ethnographer
In this conversation, the author's goal is to discuss subjectivity/s as evolving and temporal representational emergences in ethnographic fieldwork. She uses her participation in a narrative ethnographic study of women's experiences in Hindu arranged marriages to show how her positions traveled and constantly shifted in the years of fieldwork. Ultimately, she shifts focus to her fieldwork and explores the ways in which her co-participants shifted…
The Bangle Seller of Meena Bazaar
Between Stories and Theories
Habit, Home, Threshold
This essay is an experiment that attends to the habit of tea as both subject and object. A coalescence of habit as threshold as home. In an assemblage of encounters, I hear, I sense, I smell, I taste, and I show how my habit (of tea) is a trestle—both a transport and a transaction in which I arrive and depart multiple times, every day. Consider these words a kind of searching (and finding), a cartographic tracing, a constellation—of habit, of hom…
The Migration of a Smile
Bodies travel. Bodies travel geographies. Bodies perform geographies. Geopolitical migrations are the subject of much writing, performing, and debate in contemporary scholarship. In this piece, I trace the migration of an affect that sits in the liminal space between the body and the stories it tells. The smile. I ask: How does a smile migrate? What does habitat and geography have to do with this mundane expression brought onto the body as an “or…
My History of History
Rooted in the conceptual and received notion that personal histories are necessarily imbricated in larger historical, social, and political narratives, “My History of History” is a performance forum that engages individual and collective responses to pivotal historical moments. Each of the ten auto/historical performances featured here seeks the liminal space between the personal and the political to ask and answer the following questions: How do…
Introduction
Can there be a decolonial autoethnography? If so, what could such an autoethnography look, sound, and feel like? If the possibility of decolonizing this mode of knowing does not exist, then what are the impediments-discursive, material, political, social-that disallow a move to decolonized autoethnographic work? Where would decolonization take us? What does it mean to write the self in and out of colonial historical frameworks? In this special is…
Borders and Margins
I have a particular intimacy with borders. An intimacy that I inherited, but did not seek. My family history is a history of belonging and unbelonging across borders. In August 1947, my grandparents, generationally rooted to the Deraghazikhan region of Pakistan, suddenly found that their country was no longer theirs. I want to imagine what that might have felt like. You wake up one morning and find that your country is free of almost 200 years of…
Migrations
Editorial handovers are migrations that signal and embody movement, transition, and transformation. To attend to, and indeed to salute this shift as I launch my editorship of Departures in Critical Qualitative Research—what I am framing as an editorial migration—I present to the readers the first of a curated double issue that focuses on migration and its attendant features, borders, and margins. I begin this introductory essay by enacting my own…
An Extra-Ordinary Critical Intervention Forum
In summer 2019, the field of communication studies imploded, owing largely to a controversy surrounding the yearly Distinguished Scholar Award presented by the National Communication Association (NCA). Of the 80 awardees from the past three decades, only one was an academic of color. My field was a few decades delayed in its rage over this obvious display of structural racism and bigotry, but the rage was overwhelmingly welcomed. As a card-carryi…
The Essay
A found object might bring sorrow or delight, but a lost object presents a question mark. Its absence can feel like a cleave, a permanent one, in our memory. Absences inevitably lead us to quests. In this personal essay, which is linked with a larger writing project on family and material memory, I search for the contents of an “essay” written by me when I was ten years old, on the very day that India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinat…
The Second Shift as Epistemological Bonus
In 2004, when I first entered the ranks of tenure-track faculty, I knew there were three tasks that I was expected to perform as a central part of my job: teaching, research, and service. To be clear, this is the expectation of work from tenure-track faculty—only the percentage of time spent on each area differs across institutions. Since I was hired into a PhD granting program, I was fully aware that publishing was critical to my tenure and prom…
Diversity Work as Second Shift
If you follow intellectual trends in popular and academic Western feminism(s) about the labor that women perform in the home, then the phrase the second shift is almost pro forma. It was popularized and entered general parlance after the 1989 book by the same name published by Arlie Hochschild1 whose rigorous interview study with fifty married couples led her to coin this phrase. The second shift stands for the unaccounted and unpaid labor that w…
Perempuan Adat dan Kemiskinan
This article stems from my experience of conducting ethnography on indigenous Dayak Benawan women in West Kalimantan for approximately two years. Documenting the experiences and knowledge of indigenous Dayak Benawan women was a challenge for me as a researcher, a man, and part of the Dayak Benawan people. Reflection on field data reveals that indigenous women of Dayak Benawan experience multiple oppressions of poverty, starting from the family sy…
Poems, Routes
In March 2020 when the pandemic began, I found myself walking and scribbling in my notebook around the hills, country roads, and backroads of the Appalachian college town where I live and work. In the absence of human presence, I turned my attention to the nonhuman and the inanimate. Ultimately, my scribbles about these things took poetic form. I present here four poems and some notes on their emergence. They are a voice for the “tiny thoughts” t…
The Grave
This essay came into being in walking, remembering, thinking, and talking about my relationship to graves. In winter 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic began, a compulsive walker, I found myself venturing further away from home in my walks. Walking in small-town America means you inevitably encounter cemeteries where the local dead rest. Indeed, cemeteries are an intrinsic part of rural and urban landscapes. As I walked, watched the landscape, and a…
Sociology (14 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · History (8 works) · Aesthetics (7 works) · Art (7 works) · Epistemology (6 works) · Linguistics (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Political science (6 works) · Anthropology (4 works)