Paper short abstract:

Drawing from field immersion experiences from 2018-2019 in Mohgoan, a village in the Dindori district of Madhya Pradesh, the idea is to comprehend the community and researchers' challenges in participating together.

Paper long abstract:

In the beginning, the community as a part of constant interaction with the researcher to ally is challenging. For the community, many things foreground these relationships, mainly safe keeping of the daily conversations and how the researcher is the custodian of this information at the end. Immersion thus becomes an integral method of engagement with the community of people within the field immersion. Action research helps establish collectives that come together to address their common concern. These could only have been arrived at by coming into contact and interacting with them. The immersion has provided an opportunity to witness everyday experiences and negotiations. It pitched forward the layers of underneath patterns of activities which can be challenging to understand without the everyday encounters. Mohgoan, the immersion field, is inhabited mainly by the Gond tribe, an Adivasi community residing in the regions around Central India. Participation in itself has a varied genealogy in development thinking and practice than is usually acknowledged. It is where the focus of participation within the development has been witnessed during the 1990s, with its gradual spread towards Participatory Rural Appraisal(PRA) and then treating it as a definitive form of participation. (Hickey and Mohan 2004) Community participatory actions led to increased confidence between the two, resulting in community-researcher participation.