Paper short abstract:

This paper will provide an account of the authors' experience initiating a digital ethnographic archive on understudied small cities and towns in India during the pandemic, and will posit an intervention on digital ethnography as a method and a process.

Paper long abstract:

Kasba Chronicles, a digital ethnographic archive-in-progress of small cities and towns in India, was launched just as Covid-19 was declared a pandemic and parts of the world went into lockdown. The project recognises the need for a layered understanding (and a new vocabulary) of the urban vis-à-vis the small city in India, as distinct from the metropolis. Our archival process has been intuitive as well as consciously non-hierarchical: we have focused on recording everyday lives through narrative interviews, a series of podcasts, and photo stories, all conducted virtually, coordinated across continents through the pandemic. From this vantage point, this paper provides an account of our experience initiating this archive, and critically engages with a few questions. What are the interlinkages between existing digital infrastructures in small cities and towns and the digital ethnographic methods used to reimagine such spaces? Where there is an existent lack in such infrastructure, what are the implications of the 'post'-pandemic as methodological logic? An initial project within the larger archive focuses on understudied regions in Eastern India, where the authors also hail from; this also allows us to ideate on the role of positionality in digital ethnography. As we continue building this archive, this paper makes a methodological and theoretical intervention on ways of democratising the record and representation of everyday lived experiences as well as spaces within the field of urban research in India.