Dhyaan se: care-ful translations and traveling with theories

Abstract

This paper examines translation in qualitative research as an ethic of care. I conceptualize care-ful translation in conversation with teachers in India who enact care as a complex entanglement of establishing normativity, carrying out responsibility, and being responsive. I focus my examination on dhyaan, a Hindi term used by teachers when describing their practices of care and inclusive education. I demonstrate how efforts at translations are also an act of care, require care, and call on us to be care-ful. I engage with Tronto’s ethics of care to consider care-ful translations, to handle with care, stories across the borderlands of traveling with theories. As a researcher located in the United States and conducting research in India, I examine tensions around identity and knowledge in translating between the global North and the South. I describe translation through a variety of ways: language, knowledge, policy, theory; examining how these processes are entangled.