Taking an ethnographic route to study disaster-affected communities makes us grow deeply aware of seething worldly inequalities that disasters bring forth. At the same time, it makes us compassionate towards the world outside. It is imperative we reserve a piece of that compassion for our own selves, too, writes Mausumi Chetia.
In this post, PhD researcher Mausumi Chetia argues that remaining empathetic and putting the interests of the research population facing disasters before our own research methodology is fundamental.
She investigates the power imbalance between ethnographic researcher and the researched, using her own fieldwork experience as a poignant example of this power discrepancy.
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