“The learners did the mapping very well. It is very important to do it and it is the first time such a mapping has happened in this village. More community members should see this work. We can put the map somewhere where a larger community audience can see it. This kind of exercise helps build the knowledge of learners and community members. Even though I am the headman of this village, I belong to a different village originally. Through this exercise I learnt more about this village.”
This quote by the headman of village Rongsak Songma in East Garo hills at the end of our field research demonstrates the value of utilising research methods that are ultimately meaningful not just for the researcher and specialised audiences, but primarily for the community that has put in the time and labour to participate in the study.
In the first part of this series, we introduced the Chief Minister’s Youth Centres (CMYCs), an initiative of the Government of Meghalaya supported by Sauramandala Foundation, Project DEFY, and Smart Village Movement, spread across 22 centres in 8 districts of rural Meghalaya. Drawing on a recent research study with learners and community members from CMYCs, we highlighted the value of participatory research methods as a platform for the research participants to voice their challenges, aspirations and learnings from the programme.
These insights led to action plans by the participants where they mapped how the resources, skills and opportunities offered through the CMYC could be tapped in to respond to the challenges and aspirations they themselves had identified. In this article, we discuss some contextual challenges while doing field research in rural Meghalaya and our learnings from these experiences to provide broader implications for research in similar terrains and contexts within the North-East.
Time, money, and resources: Field-based research in remote areas
An 8.5+ hour road journey from the state capital, Shillong, to Williamnagar in East Garo Hills (give or take 2 hours, given the unpredictability of traffic in Shillong) and a roughly 1.5-2 hour journey from Williamnagar to Rongsak Songma across roads that become increasingly ‘kaccha’ (unmetalled roads loosely strewn with rocks or remnants of landslides) with distance. With the Simsang river flowing parallel to the roads and lush greenery engulfing the horizon, our journey to Rongsak was a reminder of how the terrain offers serenity, and yet destruction with over-exploitation of her resources.
This brief glimpse of our journey through beautiful, yet patchy roads points to the need to plan field research around climatic conditions. The intensity of rainfall and resultant landslides, while increasingly unpredictable, must be factored in as they can potentially make an entire area inaccessible. Given the nature of fieldwork-based funding particularly in research studies, the geography and weather can have far-reaching implications on the time, money and resources it takes to carry out fieldwork. Having local partners with an understanding of these factors is critical to know which months are best suited for navigating the terrain. Additionally, project staff and researchers must plan transportation arrangements beforehand through trusted local sources since the availability of public transport is scarce and infrequent, going up and down specific routes perhaps only a few times a day, and making it difficult to match to the schedule of fieldwork.
As learners pointed out in our study after mapping the availability of services in their village, there has been a massive increase in usage of mobile data in the past few years across erstwhile disconnected areas. Yet, this connectivity is regularly disrupted during the monsoon seasons, making it hard for village members to stay connected to the outside world. For researchers, many of whom increasingly use mobile-based platforms for data collection or rely on presentations or computer-based instructional material, pen-and-paper tools may offer a more reliable alternative in times when electricity and mobiles are not available.
Enhancing representation in and through research
Beyond the resources and opportunities offered through the CMYC, a key objective is to ensure community buy-in for the centre and enhance participation of diverse community members in the centre’s activities. Signing ‘social contracts’ with village representatives to cement their support is a step in this direction. Taking this forward, our study sought to involve various community members in the research process and co-create insights to address the challenges and aspirations of the community through participatory research. Upon consideration of the dominant livelihood base within the village, we understood that those involved either in MGNREGA projects or in agricultural activities would find it difficult to take out time to be involved in research during specific months and times. Yet, the premise of the study was to include a cross-section of views from within the village to ensure representation of perspectives that informed our study. We were determined to understand how best to time the activities in a way that ensured maximum participation. Eventually, we designed a field plan that mostly involved community members in the latter half of the day, even after sunset in some cases, to make the research more accessible. This had implications for commuting to and from the centre, which made it even more important for pre-planning transportation.
In group-based research, it is natural to find that power relations that exist in the community setting get mirrored within the research. These can be along the lines of social status, age, gender, etc. It is naive to assume that short-term engagements or research studies can break the complex and far more structural fault lines in the community. Yet, in being cognisant of these hierarchies, researchers can actively create avenues that encourage equal modes of engagement of different sections within the community. For instance, given the connotation of age with respect, children or younger people often feel inhibited to express themselves before elders. Since we had all age groups participate in our study, ice-breakers and warm-up activities before getting to the research were critical to cement trust between participants. Moreover, treating insights and suggestions with seriousness irrespective of the age of the participant helped convey that every person’s views would be discussed equally.
Takeaways and recommendations for researchers
Our experiences of putting together this research study reiterated the importance of ensuring that remoteness does not come in the way of equal representation in research. While we attempted to share how we navigated some of the challenges, we end this article with three key takeaways for researchers across the North-East who want to make their research studies more inclusive, representative and relevant.
First, be flexible in your plans and choose a study location that offers this flexibility in terms of time. In CMYCs, for example, we were able to keep the centre open for a longer time period to account for community members’ participation towards the evening. This may not be the case in institutional settings like schools where fixed timings can be a barrier to more representative community-based research.
Second, utilise local knowledge and resources to plan and execute the study. Whether it is the weather or livelihoods base which informs the time constraints of research participants, understanding these factors enable contextualisation and better planning.
Third, the possibilities offered through co-creating insights with research participants (in our case, through participatory methods) ensure that the benefits of the research process last well beyond the study timelines. Through village mapping or action plans in our study, learners and community members can use these resources and methods to understand and brainstorm around other challenges that may come up in the future. Like the village headman in Rongsak Songma said, “More community members should see this work. We can put the map somewhere where a larger community audience can see it. This kind of exercise helps build the knowledge of learners and community members.”
Ultimately, while deciding the methodological inclination of the study, the most important question to ask is – who is the research for and how can it enable greater agency and representation within the community?
Anoushka Gupta is the Research Lead at Project DEFY, a Bangalore-based non profit that conceptualised the Nook model with partners across India, Bangladesh, Rwanda, Uganda and Zimbabwe.
Mintioneth Fancon is the Subject Matter Expert in Self Designed Learning for the Chief Minister Youth Centres in Meghalaya.