Fieldwork in Covid times 

Ayesha Vemuri 

In the middle of March 2020, I was in New Delhi, India, attempting to squeeze in a week’s worth of fieldwork before I returned to Canada. I had originally planned to stay for several more weeks, visiting not only Delhi but also Assam, where I hoped to conduct preliminary fieldwork by initiating conversations and building relationships with people and organizations working on flood control and relief. While I wasn’t officially at the fieldwork stage of my doctorate, I was visiting India for personal reasons, and wanted to take advantage of my proximity to my research site. As the date for this visit drew closer, however, it became apparent that the Covid-19 pandemic—which initially seemed like a passing, distant concern—was becoming more serious, and that it might not be the best time to travel to Assam after all. Despite being in India, the field seemed to withdraw from me.

I decided, given the circumstances, to shorten my visit to one week. I arrived in Delhi on the 15th of March, with interviews scheduled for each day of the following week. The first couple of days were relatively “normal.” I met with friends and acquaintances with personal and professional connections to Assam—they had lived and worked in the region, and we discussed the co-constitution of floods, borders, and communal tensions in the state. These were illuminating exchanges, and I was happy with my decision to stay in India instead of leaving sooner. But as the week unfolded, each day also brought with it news of increased contamination, asymptomatic spread, mounting death tolls, and national lockdowns. I could no longer, in good conscience, meet anyone in person. For the remainder of the week, I conducted interviews over Skype and Zoom, only able to encounter “the field” remotely through my computer screen from the safety of my aunt’s house. Soon afterwards, a national lockdown was declared, and I was stuck for two and a half months in India, inescapably trapped “in the field” as well as impossibly far away from it at the same time.  

I have been reflecting on these ideas of proximity and distance as I embark on the next stages of my doctorate and consider what my dissertation research will look like, as “the field” withdraws further and further, and so much of work and life happens at a distance. How does one do research in these times of enforced distance? We are faced with the challenge of redefining the field, rethinking our sites, and reconfiguring our methods. While in some cases this feels like an insurmountable and paralysing challenge, there is also a sense of the creative possibilities of working within externally imposed constraints, and for critically rethinking accepted practices of fieldwork as well.  

For instance, in a recent panel discussion on researching South Asia from afar, Nira Wickramasinghe discussed how in some ways the pandemic acts as a great leveler in research, wherein scholars from elite universities, especially in the Global North, confront similar challenges of access to research sites that scholars from non-elite universities in the South have always faced. Manan Ahmed discusses the ways in which, for many scholars in the Global South—including those located within the national territories of their research sites—research is always conducted at a distance. The histories of colonial capture mean that many archives, documents, and objects are located far away, in sites in the Global North, and scholars from the South need to navigate the many barriers of limited resources, visa restrictions, institutional credentials and other infrastructural norms of gatekeeping to access research materials. This means that researchers have long had to develop creative means of doing research, offering important lessons for researchers everywhere. 

Moreover, distance and faraway-ness already structured Assam as a fieldsite in many ways. Prior to the pandemic, Assam and Delhi were both centres of protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC). Police and military brutality against protestors made travel to these states potentially dangerous, and fieldwork near impossible. The pandemic, in many ways, exacerbates different kinds of distance that already existed for researchers working on sites like Assam. It appears as a moment of rupture that not only sheds light on the unfair and deeply unequal practices of academic and other structures, but offers a moment to transform them.  

Text and image by Ayesha Vemuri