“The walking ethnography is a tool for embodied learning – a process in which the researcher decenters themselves, and instead lets movements, sights, sounds, and hearing lead the way. Through this emplacement, the walking ethnography took me away from the top-down analysis of my initial research and embedded me within the fabric of a neighborhood facing multiple forms of gentrification, environmental fallout, and public health issues. Triangulated with other qualitative methodologies, the walking ethnography can be a vehicle for connecting the past to the present, and for interrogating the multiple visions, framings, and understandings of complex social processes in the world around us. “

“As I grew older, I kept my artistic heritage alive. Although I went on to study literature, folklore, and earned different certifications, one aspect of childhood stayed with me- the touch of clay and its stories. When I further entered the world of professional art, I felt a tension with what kind of knowledge was seen as legitimate. These academic spaces insinuated – or claimed directly – that knowledge is valued when it is written, structured, and formally taught.”

“A 36-year-old mother from the Bargaon block, for instance, described leaving home before sunrise to attend a school meeting. She walked to the main road, took a shared transport, travelled around 35 km to attend the Parent-Teacher Meeting, and returned late in the evening, losing a full day’s wage. “If I don’t go,” she told me, “they think I don’t care. But if I go, we don’t earn that day.” She paused, as if weighing the decision again. For her, participation was not about willingness. Rather, it was shaped by what she could afford.”

“When we place two images side by side, we create a diptych, which asks the viewer to read them against or along each other. I decided to produce a series of black-and-white and colour diptychs depicting these opposite worlds. But as the pairings took shape, I realised the diptychs were doing something more than merely comparing — they were making an argument. Colour held the embodied knowledge, the cultural inheritance, and the texture of life organised around craft. Black and white depicted extraction, speed, and the monstrosity of mass production.”