Applying ‘merging of knowledge’ in Tanzania: what can we learn about interrupting patterned relationships to reveal hidden dimensions of poverty?

Merging of Knowledge is a research approach that creates the conditions for people with lived experience of poverty to participate at an equal level with academics and practitioners, in the co-generation of knowledge about poverty. This paper reflects critically on the application of ‘Merging of Knowledge’ to study poverty in Tanzania, assessing its challenges, achievements, and lessons learned about revealing hidden knowledge about poverty. It also provides a brief literature review to place the Merging of Knowledge alongside other participatory approaches. This paper finds that Merging of Knowledge can effectively interrupt patterned social relationships, and empower individuals and peer groups, thereby stimulating transformation of both academics and people and poverty. It does so by addressing imbalances in social status, empowering all groups of participants at each stage of the research, and building trust, confidence, and freedom from fear in a sustainable manner. The conclusion drawn is that Merging of Knowledge holds great promise for future research on topics where strong hierarchies of knowledge exist, and where the physical inclusion of participants in data collection is not readily translated into intellectual inclusivity during analysis and the dissemination of findings

GIRLS, GADGETS AND GATEKEEPERS: HOW GENDER AND CLASS ASPIRATIONS SHAPE ADOLESCENT ACCESS TO MOBILE PHONES IN MUMBAI, INDIA

Within a patriarchal, caste-based and restrictive family setup, how do gender and class work together to shape adolescent girls’ access to mobile phones in Mumbai, India? How do adolescent girls mediate their own independent aspirations and desires to variously fit within or subvert these frameworks of class stability and social morality? This paper addresses these question by using a mixed-methods study of 59 group interviews and 278 surveys with adolescents aged 13-15 in Mumbai. Taking an intersectional analytical framework, the findings show how gender and class together, create varying standards of respectable femininity and class distinction that families aspire to and cultivate in adolescent girls. The mobile phone can be seen as both a threat and a necessity to the maintenance of these standards of respectability, resulting in families variously enabling or constraining access to mobile phones by girls. Rather than interpreting the findings through binaries of lower-class/upper-class or empowered/constrained, I instead consider how classed ideals of respectable femininity create different aspirational conditions for girls belonging to each class group, and form the cultural frames of everyday life. I explore what implications this might have for adolescents girls’ understandings and enactments of independence, and how they use the site of the mobile phone to make these enactments

Influence as method and method as influence: Collaborative platform work in Mumbai and Delhi.

In this position paper, the authors discuss the collaborative influencing practices of women beauticians operating online and offline in Mumbai and Delhi, through the lens of the authors’ engagements with them as researchers and collaborators. The authors focus on how these beauticians skillfully develop and translate offline networking habits and connections into online engagement on platforms, through a high and continuous level of hidden cognitive labor. The authors reflect on methodological interventions they made to understand the influencing worlds of women beauticians that remain hard to access within biased platform logics. The authors ask: What does it mean to be present in the entangled lives of our interlocutors, not as flies on the wall but as our multiple selves that are called on at different times to co-create the worlds we are supposedly studying?Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/177339/1/18-Bhallamudi-Platform-Social Media and Society in India Proceedings-95-99-10.73027936.pdfDescription of 18-Bhallamudi-Platform-Social Media and Society in India Proceedings-95-99-10.73027936.pdf : Main ArticleSEL