Civil society activists and vulnerability in South India

The Relational Politics of Life History Methods and Development Research

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3978330
AutoresMatt Baillie Smith (0000-0002-1798-7329, Department of Social Sciences, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK), Katy Jenkins (0000-0002-9174-3648, Department of Social Sciences, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, autor de correspondencia)
Año2017
Volumen18
Número7
Páginas951-970
Fecha de publicación2017-10-03
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaSocial & Cultural Geography (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1464-9365 • E-ISSN: 1470-1197
EditorialInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/14649365.2016.1216157
OpenAlexW2517348015
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas9
Referencias citadas46

Life history methods are gaining popularity in Development research, linked to attempts to capture narratives marginalised by dominant accounts of Development. In this paper, we reflect on using life history methods with NGO activists in India. We explore how this approach led us to develop particular understandings of the participants as ‘vulnerable’, and the implications of this for the research process and the knowledges it produced. We explore how activists’ individual biographies were interwoven with institutional narratives, complicating but also enriching our understanding of activists’ experiences of Development. Secondly, we analyse the relationality of our subjects’ vulnerability and our own positionality as global North Development scholars. We reflect on how our engagement with Development actors we consider as vulnerable takes place through and against the relational histories and presents that brought us together. We explore the implications of this for the ways the research created both discursive and physical spaces for meeting and talking, and what this means for our approach to vulnerability. This requires an uncomfortable acknowledgement that Development research may reproduce vulnerabilities, even as it seeks to challenge them. The paper contributes to broader theorising of vulnerability, recognising vulnerability as embedded in the relationalities of the research moment

Acknowledgement · Civil society · Environmental ethics · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Popularity · Sociology · Vulnerability (computing · Gender Studies · Law · Poverty, Education, and Child Welfare · Qualitative Research Methods and Ethics · Tourism, Volunteerism, and Development