Kitchen Floor Ethnography: Knowledge from the Margins

The narrow lanes of Palamuru Basti in Hyderabad city carry different sounds in times of crisis. Palamuru Basti is a densely populated urban slum in Hyderabad, India, where the I have established long-lasting connections and friendships with several families over multiple years of fieldwork. The settlement is home to predominantly lower caste communities engaged in informal labor, including domestic workers, daily wage laborers, and other manual workers who migrated to Hyderabad, the fifth largest city in India, seeking better economic opportunities. As my primary research site, Palamuru Basti represents one of Hyderabad’s 775 officially recognized urban slums, characterized by precarious housing conditions, limited infrastructure, and residents navigating multiple vulnerabilities of caste discrimination, gender subordination, and economic marginalization.

Where once the rhythmic clatter of daily life and the morning conversations of women preparing for domestic work marked the predictable cadence of daily survival, 2024 brought disruptions that fundamentally altered not only the acoustic landscape of this urban settlement but the very nature of ethnographic engagement itself. The familiar sounds of children’s laughter echoing between concrete walls gave way to hushed conversations about mounting debts, the mechanical hum of the water pump was punctuated by anxious discussions of job security, and a domestic abuse survivor’s careful footsteps racing home before her husband’s return carried new urgency as economic pressures intensified domestic surveillance.

As I navigated my final year of dissertation research¹ among lower caste communities, particularly women, in India’s informal labor sector, these sonic transformations signaled something more profound than seasonal change or temporary hardship. They marked the emergence of what I have come to understand as ethnography in crisis: a methodological and ethical framework that emerges when the boundaries between researcher and researched, between academic observation and human survival, between scholarly rigor and care ethics, collapse into urgent questions of mutual aid and collective endurance. This framework builds on feminist anthropological insights about the politics of knowledge production (Behar & Gordon, 1995; Visweswaran, 1994) while extending Veena Das’s understanding of how critical events reshape everyday life (Das, 2006) to examine how crisis becomes a condition of ethnographic possibility rather than impediment. Ethnography in crisis recognizes crisis not as an exceptional interruption to ethnographic work but as a revelatory condition that exposes dimensions of knowledge production, community resilience, and survival strategies that remain invisible under ordinary circumstances.

My 2024 began with what seemed like manageable challenges: visa renewals, funding negotiations, the familiar dance between institutional requirements and community relationships that defines long-term fieldwork. However, it quickly unfolded as a year when crisis became not an external threat to research but its defining characteristic, echoing patterns of the ethnography of violence where researchers must navigate the same uncertainties and vulnerabilities as their research participants (Robben & Nordstrom, 1995). The women whose lives anchor this research found themselves navigating escalating vulnerabilities that mirrored and intersected with my own emerging institutional and personal crises. Neelamma, a domestic cook and cleaner, watched her daughter Chandra face increasingly violent domestic abuse while struggling with her own health decline; Ramanamma and Saritha, who worked as cleaners in IT offices, confronted new forms of job insecurity as tech sector layoffs reduced building occupancy and cleaning contracts. Simultaneously, my journey of navigating the complex realities of long-distance research – from health emergencies that required sudden travel to family obligations spanning continents, from the intricate bureaucracies of international documentation to the evolving landscape of academic funding cycles – created a cascade of disruptions that required constant adaptation and renegotiation of research timelines and methodological approaches.

This past academic year fundamentally transformed both my methodological approach and understanding of how knowledge emerges from the intersection of vulnerability and resistance in marginalized communities. What began as traditional ethnographic observation evolved into an ethnography of mutuality as a framework that recognizes crisis not as an obstacle to research but as a revelatory condition exposing dimensions of survival knowledge that remain invisible under ordinary circumstances. When shared precarity dissolved boundaries between researcher and researched, the sophisticated systems of care, resource sharing, and collective resistance that sustain life in Palamuru Basti became accessible not as research participants but as practical resources for mutual survival.

Rather than derailing ethnographic engagement, these converging crises revealed how traditional boundaries between researcher and research participants dissolve when shared vulnerability creates conditions for genuine mutuality. Women who had initially appeared in my field notes as research participants became collaborators in survival; their sophisticated knowledge of urban navigation, resource sharing, and bureaucratic manipulation proved essential to my own continued fieldwork presence. This transformation challenges fundamental assumptions about ethnographic authority and suggests that crisis reveals essential dimensions of marginalized communities’ knowledge production that can only be accessed through relations of mutuality rather than extraction, insights that emerge not despite vulnerability but because of it.

When Crisis Becomes Method: Redefining Ethnographic Boundaries

The transformation of ethnographic practice during 2024’s cascading crises revealed how disrupted fieldwork conditions can generate insights unavailable through traditional coherent observation. Instead of viewing crisis as methodological failure, what emerged was a productive framework for understanding how knowledge production operates through discontinuity, interruption, and the kind of improvised relationships that define survival in marginalized communities. When the urgency of research completion intersected with participants’ economic precarity, the familiar boundaries between observer and observed dissolved into shared intensities of anxiety, care, and mutual vulnerability that structure daily life under conditions of systematic uncertainty.

The collapse of traditional research boundaries became most visible during moments of intimate care that emerged not from ethnographic design but from mutual recognition of need. When Neelamma invited me to sit beside her on the floor of her small government-allocated house and began oiling my hair with the same coconut oil she used for her granddaughter Honey, her weathered hands carried knowledge that emerges through practices of care rather than verbal articulation. This wasn’t a research moment I had planned or could have anticipated, it arose from her observation that I looked exhausted, that my hair was unkempt from weeks of sleeping poorly due to visa stress, that I needed comfort in ways I couldn’t ask for directly.

These moments dissolved years of carefully maintained ethnographic distance, revealing how traditional participant observation fails to capture the relational knowledge that sustains survival networks. Neelamma’s quiet humming filled silences that formal interviews had never bridged. The oil was warm from sitting in the afternoon sun, and as she worked it through my hair in slow, deliberate strokes, she began talking about her own daughter Chandra’s marriage troubles, not as research data but as one worried woman to another. The gesture of hair oiling carried decades of maternal knowledge about care under constraint, creating relationships that generate meaning through fragmented rather than totalizing encounters. Neelamma understood, perhaps better than I initially did, that my visible stress about research timelines and institutional pressures mirrored her own anxiety about Chandra’s deteriorating marriage and her granddaughter’s future. When she began sharing her evening meals with me, insisting I needed “proper food to think properly,” she was extending networks of care that create kinship through practice rather than biology. I would arrive at her doorstep after long days of interviews, emotionally drained from hearing stories of workplace abuse and domestic violence, and she would wordlessly hand me a plate of rice and dal, waiting until I finished eating before beginning any conversation about my research.

This transformation required reconceptualizing care as an epistemological framework that generates insights through attentiveness to interdependence rather than maintaining artificial boundaries between knowledge production and survival necessity. When Anjamma, another domestic laborer, spent an entire afternoon teaching me to navigate government health services during a medical emergency, she was demonstrating institutional literacy that marginalized populations develop through necessity but which remains invisible to traditional ethnographic methods. I was exhausted and dehydrated after prolonged periods of conducting fieldwork, and instead of treating this as a research interruption, Anjamma made it a teaching moment about survival. Her patient explanation of which offices to visit first, which documents to bring, which officials to approach with deference versus assertiveness, revealed survival strategies developed through decades of bureaucratic navigation. She walked me through the labyrinthine corridors of government hospitals, showing me how to read the body language of clerks to determine their willingness to help, how to time requests around tea breaks and shift changes, and how to present myself as deserving of assistance rather than entitled to it. These weren’t abstract lessons but practical knowledge needed for my immediate survival, demonstrating how marginalized populations develop sophisticated systems of mutual aid precisely because state systems fail to provide adequate support.

Similarly, when Meenakshi, who works as a cleaner in office spaces, shared her institutional knowledge during my visa renewal process, her guidance revealed ways of operating within systems of power that transform constraint into possibility through creative adaptation. My student visa was up for renewal, at the same time, I was also focusing on my dissertation fieldwork. These were competing priorities, both requiring my focus and attention. Rather than viewing this as my personal crisis, Meenakshi treated it as a collective problem requiring community resources. Her ability to read the subtle social cues that indicate when a government official might be receptive to requests, her understanding of how to frame documentation needs in language that bureaucrats find compelling, her knowledge of which community networks could provide support during administrative delays, all of this represented embodied wisdom about surviving state systems designed to exclude people like her. These exchanges generated knowledge based on situational understanding rather than traditional extraction, creating accountability where research insights emerge from and remain accountable to the relationships that enable their production. The women weren’t helping me as research participants supporting an academic project; they were sharing their experiences of being caught in the webs of institutional violence that they navigate daily, someone whose survival had become entangled with their own.

Guerrilla Care Ethics: Underground Networks of Survival and Knowledge

In the margins of formal institutions, where traditional support systems fail and conventional protocols prove inadequate, emerges what can be understood as “guerrilla care ethics”, clandestine networks of mutual aid that operate beneath the radar of dominant power structures. Like guerrilla warfare, these ethics arise from conditions of institutional abandonment, creating alternative survival strategies that remain largely invisible to those in positions of authority. In places like Palamuru Basti, women had long practiced sophisticated systems of resource sharing and collective resistance, developing what would become visible through strategic acts of subversion. When research funding delays threatened one of my colleague’s fieldwork, Ramanamma quietly arranged sleeping space on her floor, fabricating a story about distant relatives to her husband. When language barriers created obstacles in government offices during another colleague’s fieldwork, Saritha would appear unexpectedly, expertly translating not just words but the hidden codes of bureaucratic interaction. These interventions revealed parallel care systems operating outside formal recognition, networks that could mobilize resources across the city within hours, track safe versus exploitative employers, and develop collective strategies for navigating relationships with authorities.

The true depth of guerrilla care ethics emerged during collective crises that demanded coordinated response. When Chandra’s domestic violence escalated, the women orchestrated elaborate support systems: Ramanamma would hide her for three days, then pass her to Saritha’s cousin across town, while others pooled money for medical treatment and carefully rehearsed stories to tell her husband about her whereabouts. External researchers became incorporated not as detached observers but as contributors to collective survival – I learned to lie convincingly to Chandra’s husband about seeing her at the market, to transfer money through informal channels that left no paper trail, and to recognize the subtle hand signals that meant “danger, change the subject.” These practices constituted systematic approaches to knowledge production and resource distribution that challenged conventional academic boundaries. Community members insisted that education represented collective investment, contributing personal savings to support research when institutional funding failed. The ethics proved expandable across geographical boundaries, with local networks helping connect struggling graduate students to parallel support systems in other cities.

This collaborative survival generated methodological innovations where knowledge emerged through shared navigation of uncertainty rather than detached analysis. Boundaries between researchers and researched became fluid through mutual care practices, creating ethical tensions that demanded new approaches acknowledging how fieldwork relationships generate obligations extending beyond academic protocols. Rather than retreating to conventional methodological boundaries, embracing these relationships revealed how community resilience develops through improvised, mutually dependent relationships that crisis conditions both generate and sustain. The dissolution of traditional research boundaries became foundational to guerrilla care ethics as survival strategies operating through stealth, creativity, and collective action while remaining invisible to institutional surveillance.

These transformations exposed the inadequacy of conventional research ethics designed for controlled laboratory conditions rather than messy realities of long-term community engagement during crisis. Formal consent processes and mandated professional distance proved not only impractical but actively harmful when survival depended on mutual aid networks. When community members shared meals or provided bureaucratic guidance, these exchanges generated insights impossible through formal interview protocols while creating lasting obligations. The knowledge emerging through care relationships challenged unidirectional education models, instead developing multidirectional circulation of survival strategies among community members and researchers facing similar institutional vulnerabilities.

The process also revealed particular vulnerabilities of marginalized researchers caught between institutional demands and community obligations. Constant performance of academic competence while depending on community support created exhausting double consciousness, maintaining professional credibility while acknowledging fundamental dependence on those supposedly being “studied”. The emotional labor of separating my research persona from personal precarity proved unsustainable as crises revealed how academic success often relies on extractive relationships with marginalized communities who receive little benefit from scholarly production.

Guerrilla care ethics ultimately represents survival strategies developed through underground networks of marginalized researchers that prefigure more humane academic possibilities. These emerge through whispered conversations between struggling graduate students, informal resource sharing that bypasses official channels, and collective strategies for managing psychological tolls of vulnerable research conditions. Like marginalized communities creating hidden survival systems, researchers develop covert transcripts of mutual support that sustain academic careers while protecting against institutional exploitation. The ethics operate through practices that imagine alternative knowledge production organized around care rather than extraction, collaboration rather than competition, and accountability rather than individual achievement. These practices include informal mentorship networks sharing survival strategies across institutional boundaries, collective resource pooling that enables conference attendance for unfunded scholars, emotional support systems sustaining hope during institutional abandonment, and collaborative writing that challenges single-authored publication as the primary success marker. 

Guerrilla care ethics challenges dominant academic culture by revealing how genuine knowledge production and human flourishing emerge not through individual competition and institutional hierarchy, but through underground networks of mutual care, shared vulnerability, and collective resistance to exploitative systems. These alternative frameworks sustain both researchers and communities through shared precarity while operating beneath institutional radar, creating possibilities for more humane forms of academic engagement that prioritize collective survival over individual advancement.

The women of Palamuru Basti demonstrated that survival itself represents sophisticated knowledge production, revealing how marginalized communities transform constraint into possibility through networks of care that sustain human dignity under conditions designed to eliminate it. Their wisdom suggests that academic knowledge production must shift from extractive models that benefit institutions at the expense of communities toward collaborative frameworks that contribute to rather than extract from the networks of care that enable understanding. Ethnography of mutuality commits to maintaining these relationships and accountabilities long after formal research concludes, while guerrilla care ethics provides practical strategies for sustaining both researchers and communities through the structural violence of contemporary academic institutions. This transformation demands recognition that scholarship must serve not only academic audiences but the communities whose wisdom and resilience make such research possible. The underground networks of care that sustained both my research and community survival during this past academic year point toward academic futures organized around mutual aid rather than competitive individualism, collaborative knowledge production rather than extractive observation, and long-term accountability rather than temporary engagement. These futures already exist in the margins of academic institutions, sustained by marginalized researchers who understand that survival depends on the same networks of care and resistance that enable meaningful scholarship.

1. This essay draws from a broader dissertation project examining good life aspirations among 60 women belonging to lower caste communities in Hyderabad’s informal labor sector, complemented by interviews with 10-15 state and non-state officials across a spectrum of employment contexts. While the dissertation captures this wider scope, this essay focuses specifically on interactions with a few key participants to illuminate ethnography in crisis.