An important question for my part of the REALM research has been about following up on my earlier work, which strongly suggested that Gulf migration, for Malayalis, is not “just about the money”. I’ve been asking people to identify what other aspects are important to them. Now, UK project assistant Helen Underhill and I have been sifting over 100 free-form qualitative interviews and putting some of our findings into a
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
When we do research, we have a project and a plan, but often – especially in long-term ethnographic work – something comes up that we hadn’t expected to be thinking about. This happened to me while conducting my part of REALM. I found myself engaging with ‘border ethnography’ – partly because I experienced delays and some difficulties with my Indian research visa, partly because of events that were happening back
