This reflexive account of fieldwork with disaster-affected communities in Kerala, India, recounts the researcher’s engagement with positionality and ethics. A participatory method was adopted—enlisting local field guides who mediated the researcher’s interactions with participants. Apart from offering pragmatic solutions for accessing participants, the method enhanced the researcher’s contextual/cultural insight, and facilitated a relationship of trust. The researcher-guide dynamic is explored as a co-constructing and relational method that minimizes harm and maximizes benefit for participants. Ethics of care is elucidated as a practicable ethical framework for thinking and doing disaster research, illustrated with reference to the present method.
The present paper discusses in part the findings from the first author’s master’s dissertation exploring the experience of childhood in the context of increased academic expectations in society, with special reference to Kerala, India. The objectives were to understand how academic expectations on children shape their childhoods and to document children’s time use and daily lives. A mixed research design was chosen: in-depth interviews were supplemented by a quantitative study on the time allocations of children for different activities. Triangulation of data was done by interviewing three groups of participants: children (
n
= 10), parents (
n
= 8), and key informants (
n
= 3) selected through convenience and purposive sampling. The qualitative data and time-use data are from separate samples. The latter study was conducted on fifth and sixth graders (
N
= 320) from the Kozhikode district of Kerala. Children’s voices indicated an over-emphasis on academic achievement from different quarters: parents, teachers, and peers. This is reflected in their day-to-day conversations, peer cultures, and daily pursuits. Findings from the time-use study supported the qualitative data: routines of children predominantly revolved around academic activities (35% of 24 hours, including time at school), and little time was devoted to physical play (5.67%). Parents’ voices corroborated these findings and gave insights into the children’s internalization of societal beliefs regarding academic achievement. Inputs from the key informants helped understand the development of the societal beliefs and practices that perpetuate a preoccupation with educational attainment in the community, and the adverse psycho-social impact it has on the children in this context.
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