Fictions, Frictions and Fragments: Reflections on Feminist Futures of Research

Abstract

ABSTRACT Building on critiques of ‘traditional’ fieldwork methods that not only reproduce masculinist and imperialist epistemes but also circumscribe possibilities of what can be studied and by whom, this article unpacks what it might mean to study the global North from the global South. My research focuses on the figure of the Indian doctoral candidate, with field sites in India, engaging in feminist knowledge production within American universities. My fieldwork then is not so much rooted in a physical site but is a shifting terrain marked by many intra-actions – of peoples, of technologies, of theories and of knowledges. If ethnographic writing depends on conjuring the sensory and experiential time and place of ‘immersive’ fieldwork in order to achieve credibility, then my own writing steps away from this credo and focuses on politics of in-betweenness, fragmented-ness and dissonance in an attempt to establish integrity. Unpacking the possibilities and constraints of researching from afar, rather than simply claiming closeness to my interlocutors or an abiding sense of mutual trust I choose to claim fictions, frictions and fragments that pass between and through us to reimagine feminist futures of research.