By Anushree, Research Assistant, NIHR-GEMMS, India
Stories and Reflection from the fieldwork in M-East Ward, Mumbai, India
This photo essay series reflects on fieldwork conducted during interviews with migrants in the M-East Ward: On learning to witness, on being changed by what you see, and on the slow becoming that unfolds in spaces where care, community, and researchers meet.
Holding the Relational: Friendships and Fieldwork
You are in a debrief.
The community researchers begin to share their experiences.
One of them mentions how the migrant woman she was speaking to was cleaning out bhaji to sell at the market. So, she sat down beside her, helping quietly while continuing the conversation.
Another tells you the woman she met was anxious about getting dinner ready before her husband came home, so she helped with that too, while interviewing.
Another researcher says they didn’t stop checking on the participant after the interviews. They returned. Twice. To see if the referral had helped. To ask if anything else was needed.
You listen. You learn that
This is research.
This is care.
This is ethics in practice.
This is how knowledge is built together, co-produced.
You think about how you were taught ethics: through review boards and informed consent forms.
But here, ethics is softer. More fluid.
It is cooked into shared food, spoken through gesture, and held through repeated presence.
Care as Method
The field offers many things:
trust, laughter, warmth.
It gives you stories that won’t make it to the report.
It gives you questions that won’t leave you.
But it also stretches you.
You’re asked to keep showing up.
To hold more than you thought you could.
To witness things that stay with you long after you’ve left the site.
You realise the hardest part is not just listening to difficult stories,
it’s staying with them.
Letting them in. Letting them shift your worldview.
Letting them change your sense of what responsibility looks like.
And then, there are your colleagues.
The ones you debrief with over chai.
The ones who ask, “How was today?” and wait, really wait, for your answer.
The ones who carry not just their field notes, but your feelings too.
And this staying is only possible because you are held too.
By a web of care.
By friendships that form beside the research.
By people who sit next to you in silence, pass you a bottle of water, and hold your gaze when the weight of it all gets heavy, sitting with you, holding the weight of all that is unknown.
Fieldwork is not done alone.
It moves through many hands, hearts, and conversations – shaped by the ones who sit with you, walk beside you, and remind you that you’re not in it by yourself.
It is carried through shared pauses, laughter, questions with no answers, and the slow trust of relationships that hold steady across time.
And maybe, what makes the work possible is not just the knowledge we build-
but also the care that gathers around us while we do.
In the field, stories don’t end – they linger. What remains with us are not just transcripts, but moments of holding and being held. This essay is a small attempt to honour those moments, the people who made them possible, and the quiet, everyday ways in which this care becomes method.
Between Stories and a Cup of Chai
End of the 4-part photo essay series
Photo Credits: Most photographs featured in this essay series were taken by the author (Anushree) during the data collection phase of the NIHR-GEMMS project. The image accompanying the caption of “Care as Method” was generously shared by community researcher Manisha Balaji Uphade.
This research was funded by the NIHR (NIHR Global Health Research; grant nihr134629) using UK aid from the UK Government to support global health research. The views expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the NIHR or the UK government.
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