Aruna and Mathews | Reflections on Interdisciplinary Research
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This blog takes the form of a conversation between two anthropologists, Aruna and Mathews, reflecting on their work within If Cities Could Speak, a collaborative research effort led by Kounkuey Design Initiative, alongside Indian Institute for Human Settlements, African Centre for Cities, Sierra Leone Urban Research Centre, and International Institute for Environment and Development, with support from the Wellcome Trust. The study works across cities in the Global South to understand how climate change is experienced as a health issue in urban informal settlements.
Rather than offering a methods note or project summary, this piece reflects on what it means to practice anthropology inside interdisciplinary teams, how ethnographic sensibilities travel, shift, and sometimes resist, while navigating questions of health, climate, and everyday life in contexts marked by vulnerability and uncertainty.
We have created a broad introduction and then a couple of questions. We have taken turns to respond to these questions from our point of view of working with interdisciplinary teams across India and Kenya. The highlight is to discuss how interdisciplinary teams work on an interdisciplinary research question and how we navigate this journey to make meanings and understand the many truths from urban vulnerable settlements.
The discipline of Anthropology has been shaped through understanding different cultures and at the same time, Anthropological methodologies have been borrowed by many other disciplines. Here, doing ethnography with an interdisciplinary team, for an interdisciplinary enquiry, I see this as a story of give and take. Also, at an individual level, this project gave me an opportunity to reflect on (a) my anthropological lens - how this has been shaped, and (b) my professional trajectory has shaped me as an ethnographer - starting as a medical anthropologist working in urban slums for my doctoral work, followed by as a faculty of public health using anthropological lens to study different marginalised communities to now as the only anthropologist in an interdisciplinary team working on an interdisciplinary research enquiry.
Working on the thematic of health and climate change in vulnerable urban settlements - I had to wear many hats of an ethnographer, public health specialist as well as an individual who has seen these sites through many years. Discussing positionality is an important step not just for the research enquiry but also for the place of research and the participants of the research, along with how we position ourselves within the team. As I said earlier, this has been a dance, a well choreographed give and take and sensing and learning and reflecting all along. Looking back, I could sum it up as follows, an ethnographer allows things to emerge while being in the background never at the centre stage - in the same fashion, for me, the main aspect in all these is what I see, to observe and let the 'field' operate around me. My modus operandi is always to have a strong, broad introduction and ask very few questions, listening to what people around are saying, engaging with and not to be in a hurry to find an answer or 'fish' for a term which is familiar to us as researchers.
When we started this work, one thing was immediately clear: I was the only anthropologist on the team. Everyone else came from adjacent but very different disciplines, housing, planning, public health, urban systems. That position mattered. It shaped not just how I worked, but how anthropology itself entered the project. So when we talk about applying an anthropological lens inside multidisciplinary teams, for me it's less about method and more about posture. How you enter. What you privilege. What you slow down. I come from design anthropology, and one of the biggest shifts that brings is moving away from intervention as the starting point, and toward knowing. Not fixing. Not solving. Sitting with questions long enough to understand what actually matters to people, on their terms.
I should also say: this was my first time working in an urban informal settlement in this way. I had just completed my PhD in the US, and I hadn't worked extensively in dense urban settings before. That could have been a disadvantage. But in practice, it became a strength. I came in with curiosity rather than certainty. I didn't take things for granted. I paid attention to the mundane, how people moved through space, how they spoke about their days, how they described discomfort, heat, fatigue, breath. Things that don't immediately announce themselves as "data," but are deeply ethnographic. I'm also not a medical anthropologist. In a project framed around climate change and health, that could sound like a limitation. But again, it opened space. I wasn't arriving with fixed categories of illness or predefined health outcomes. I went in open, allowing grounded theory to emerge, listening carefully for vernacular understandings of climate and health, how they show up in everyday life, episodically and systemically.
Since we are working with a diverse team in terms of disciplines and languages, also sites which are geographically and linguistically different, the strength lies in the long term-ness of our processes, immersive nature of our fieldwork, getting immersed with data and anecdotes and playing them in our head during debriefing and post field work meetings. Unlike traditional ethnographies, where an ethnographer stays in the 'field' for a long term, we chose to be in our 'field sites' multiple times for two weeks at a stretch throughout the calendar year and more. This also helped in shaping the tools, what is appropriate to ask, panning our point of view and understanding the emic-ness of the field/sites.
Also we are engaging with people who are marginalized, in settlements which are vulnerable, and at a time when even a mundane question like 'where are you from' could be fraught with complex realities. A slower approach, essentially helped building trust, engagement and offered time to both parties to assess boundaries and sensitive edges. This work was carried out through the climate realities in real time, so this helped both research team and the community to engage, experience and understand the contexts of lived realities better.
From the very beginning, we made a deliberate choice during our ethnographic entry: we privileged relationships over note-taking. We didn't arrive with large notebooks or visible recording devices. We chatted. We sat. We listened. That mattered. It broke down the immediate divide between "researcher" and "community." It allowed conversations to unfold more naturally, more relationally. When we needed to document, we used voice notes. Over time, those voice notes became an archive, text, audio, geo-notes layered together. A living record rather than a static transcript. That came with ethical questions, especially around using WhatsApp as a research tool. We spent time reflecting on that. We were careful not to capture identifiable information. We paid close attention to who was included in groups, what was shared, and what was deliberately left out. Convenience can easily slide into carelessness if you're not attentive.
We designed the fieldwork around long-term immersion. Time mattered. Initially, we structured the research in three cycles aligned with seasons, cold, hot, rainy. The idea was to support recall and capture change over time. In practice, that neat structure didn't quite hold. Life doesn't organize itself that way. What mattered more was return. Coming back. Being seen again. Not just passing through. Returning clarified things ethnographically, but it also signaled commitment. We weren't extractive. We weren't in a hurry. There were ethical implications to that. We were taking time from participants, so we worked carefully around their schedules. We also put together small tokens of appreciation, food items, practical support, guided by what people actually needed, not by a standardized incentive logic.
This flows in continuation with the previous point, I wish to take an example to elucidate this aspect of language and meaning making in the field. For our northern Indian sites of Patna and Delhi, operational language is Hindi. As we all know, languages change depending on places and situations. In our climate change and health work, we created a list of local vocabularies for common terms like heat, extreme heat and so on. In Patna for example, people would go on speaking about how summers have become unbearable and use terms like 'leher' (literally meaning waves) and 'ghaam' (ghaam in Bengali (my mother tongue) means sweat) and it was interesting to piece through how meanings emerge through our different lingiuistic positions and what actually is meant. I see this as a step towards using 'emic' languages as part of our vocabulary.
Language was central throughout. Translation was about communicating across teams; but also about preserving the feel of how people spoke. The project was interested in the vernacular of climate and health, and that meant resisting the urge to overly sanitize language for analytical convenience. Some things don't translate cleanly. Heat is not always "heat." Illness is not always illness. Sometimes it's exhaustion. Sometimes it's sweat. Sometimes it's a word that doesn't exist in English or in project vocabularies at all. Our job was to hold that tension—to translate enough to communicate across disciplines, while keeping the texture of the original language intact.
This section flows from above, as mentioned through language, how we understand their stories and meaning making. Also what we observed around the field sites and in the families to get a deeper sense of what they are saying, who they are and their stories of resilience. Understanding 'emic' is also differential - how we are trained, what has been our exposure and understanding of these vulnerable settlements, and constantly checking that we are interested to know their stories in their words and meaning and not getting overpowered by the languages of research proposal or the tools we discussed in our research meetings. Flexibility with which we operated also created room for people to trust us, trust our research questions and our movements in their settings and so on.
Many times, I had to pause and reflect to contextualize my own 'going native' moments, to quote Bronislaw Malinowski. Because I carry baggage of familiarity, of languages, of situations coming from a community who have carried partition/migration/exodus in their genes. The slow paced ethnographies, many meetings and our going-coming to our sites enriched the process through which we made sense and meaning making, adding rigour to our analytical framework.
One thing that helped was being very intentional about not going to theory too early. We worked with the team to bookmark what was emerging from the field versus what was our interpretation. That distinction wasn't rigid, but it was discussed openly. We held regular reflection sessions, spaces to think aloud, to compare notes, to surface discomfort or confusion. Those sessions became analytic anchors. They allowed us to move between emic perspectives and broader interpretation without collapsing one into the other.
As a trained anthropologist with long standing experience of carrying out ethnographies across different geographies has given me the vantage point of what to expect in a new setting and how to circumvent such situations. The decision to go slow, not in a hurry to record or photograph or recruit participants came in handy for our long term engagement with our sites for this work. Similarly, working with different sets of researchers and disciplines have been a common point through my research trajectory. Planning fieldwork and debriefing and many meetings with research teams before and after each fieldwork, during the fieldwork created room for discussion, also leading by example - like initiating interactions, and interviews, especially in the initial phase, with the research team members.
Leading the team ethnographically required wearing multiple hats. Some team members were encountering these sites for the first time. So we redesigned the ethnographic guide to start with entry rather than extraction. Community walks. Learning the terrain. Interacting informally before selecting households or diving deeper. Understanding the place and the people reshaped the questions. It refined how we engaged. Community interlocutors became co-researchers. They helped interpret what we were seeing. They corrected us. They reflected with us. That collective reflection was one of the most important learning points for the team. Ethnographic leadership became teaching-through-doing. It required patience. Sharing readings. Identifying teachable moments in the field. While we had a formal inception, many lessons, on ethics, observation, fieldnote-taking, interaction, happened as we went.
One moment I'm particularly proud of was our annual meeting in 2025. The team presented ethnographic material using voice, reflection, and narrative. Most of them had never worked with ethnographic data before. The depth they achieved, describing households, first impressions, how their understanding shifted over time, was remarkable.
What is right and from whose point of view is at the core when we do ethnographic work and often these answers emerge as we spend more time, and know more people. Training in ethics can build foundation, but experience and understanding the contexts of the sites needs to be woven together to operate with ethics. Starting from site selection, planning our recce, working on research tools, languages, entering the field - each and every step that we took, we kept in mind contexts of positionality, reflexivity, and future repercussions with the research team.
Ethics, for us, was something we lived and experienced. Over time, our role shifted from researchers entering the fields we had worked in through different lenses, climate and health…. we became familiar figures in these households because of the repetition and the time we spend in the field. We shared time and stories but we were present through illness, recovery, and in one case, loss. For example, when a household member passed away during the study, someone we had first met during our entry, the entire team visited the family in solidarity. There was no protocol for that. It was simply the right thing to do. That moment stayed with us. It reminded us that this work isn't just about surfacing voices. It's about creating space for people to tell their stories, on their terms, and being present when those stories extend beyond the research frame. Even tools like WhatsApp, useful as they were, remained ethically charged. We stayed vigilant about privacy, consent, and boundaries. Who was included. What circulated. What didn't.
Like I always say, research, especially ethnographic research is like our life process - you get what you give. It's not like what to ask and how to ask but who is asking and for why. The quality of ethnographic work lies so much on us, the person we are and our worldviews, how we create room for multiple truths and allow those truths to be part of larger realities.
Looking back, the biggest lesson has been this: anthropology in multidisciplinary work isn't about defending a discipline. It's about holding space, for slowness, for uncertainty, for meaning to emerge. And perhaps most importantly, it's about staying with people long enough for their stories to unfold in ways that challenge how we thought we understood the problem in the first place.
