Accepted Panels

Though an embarrassing fact, most knowledge is a product of studying beneath the researcher’s self. The audacity of this pursuit lay in the researcher’s social standing that is assured to extract details of the lifeworld of those with the lower social standing. Knowledge thus produced, while essential and has furthered the epistemic and disciplinary growth, historically and epistemically has not been democratic. Thinking through democratisation of knowledge production and the possible techniques of ethnographic research that illustrate how ethnographers from the marginalised communities have tested and experimented with unspoken public secret about ‘who studies whom and how’– this panel invites papers that provocatively engages with some of these questions: why do the marginalised prefer studying their own or those who are marginalised worse than their self? Why should the interlocutors be less endowed than us? What stops us from studying those above? How does one study up?
The panel intends to initiate discussion on how labour of democratising knowledge production systems demands for more creative practices of solidarities beyond the binaries amplified by contemporary identity politics. Second, the panel acknowledges the fact that very few templates of reference exist on the issues and on techniques of research in uncharted field sites for and by scholars from marginalised and peripheral locations. The panel aims to deliberate on documenting techniques and methods of ethnographic research for the future scholars of social sciences. 
Contributions are invited from scholars from marginalised and peripheral social locations in contemporary Indian academia working on caste, religious minorities, and race, to deliberate on reflexive experiences, methodologies, and methods of ethnographic research. Contributors should be keen on analysing their work(s) beyond the existing positionality debates but speak to the dynamic shifts of power in knowledge production, studying up and the above.