REALM PIs Meetup at NYUAD March 15th/ 16th
Helen Underhill (the UK project assistant) and I are excited to be travelling to NYUAD in Abu Dhabi this week to a meetup of REALM project PIs. We will all be presenting our material (which for some folk, such as the economists, is ‘data’, but for ethnographers like myself is more loosely ‘outcome’).
I’ve got 76 interviews with Kerala migrants and a lot of fieldnotes from ongoing conversations that I’ve been having since the 1990s with a few long-term respondents. These are families that I’ve known both in Kerala and in Gulf, and whose lives have become entangled with mine. I’ll be preparing my presentation this week and posting from Abu Dhabi.
You can see here the current portfolio of projects in this major initiative, which draws together people working in different methodologies, at different scales, and in different locations – but all with a shared focus. This multi-scalar mixed methods approach is what makes REALM such an interesting project to be part of – and will make our findings strong and reliable.
Already last year, when we met, we found new trends and emergent themes appearing across different people’s project findings. During the past year we’ve been checking out some of those hints and trying to get near to the underlying factors prompting the trends. I’ve got some interesting results on this and will be writing up and posting soon.
Bookmark or follow the blog to hear more as we move along with our results and dissemination phase.