Workers and Margins by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789811378768
Publisher: Springer Singapore

Methods

In order to understand how the public sector township informs the intellectual craft of the citizen, I rely on accessing narratives of people who lived as children in these townships. Later, they crafted their own careers and while some of them found jobs in public sector enterprises, others moved to jobs in the private sector. I rely on their memories to construct accounts of what the sociality of life in the public sector township was. Poulos (2016) argues that memories have a lyrical vagueness about them which helps people remember important events in emotionally significant ways. I relied on memories to understand how the atmosphere of living in the public sector township shaped the lives of people.

I engaged in unstructured conversations with twenty-two respondents who had lived in a public sector township in Bengaluru. The public sector township belongs to an Indian public sector unit that plays a strategic role for the defence sector. I knew several people in this township as I had friends and had been deeply connected to them. I had followed what had happened to their lives over a period of time. I gained access to them through a strategy of opening up shared memories of life in the township and explaining to them the objectives of my study.

Peticca-Harris et al. (2016) argue that access is not merely an administrative hurdle after which the real process of research can begin. Instead, access is a process of establishing emotional connections that can reveal themselves in interesting ways over a period of time. While establishing access, I recalled several poignant and comic moments that we had experienced when I used to visit the public sector township many years ago. These emotional connections helped us to recover several implicit aspects of life in the township which we had never openly discussed earlier. The township had grown with us, and we had never fully grown out of the township.

I explained the objectives of the study to all my informants and promised them confidentiality. I have anonymized their identities in this chapter. Sixteen of my participants were men and six of them were women. All participants were above forty years of age and none of them lived in the township in which they had grown as children and young adults. All participants were formally employed and married. While I had kept in touch with some of them by attending various events in their lives such as marriage or birthdays of children, I had lost touch with several of them.

I established contact with people whom I was not in touch through mutual references. Once I established contact with them, I opened up a range of informal conversations with them about schooling, reading, gossip, career, work, media and society. I asked them to recollect the role that school had played in their lives. I also reflected on the nature of gossip that they had participated in and experienced while living in the township. Our conversations also focused on the changing nature of school, media, employment contracts and the role of the public sector in Indian society.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.