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Paper short abstract

Tracing precarious migrant households over time, this study reveals how gendered labour, care, and crisis reconfiguration unsettle linear development logics, offering a feminist temporal lens on survival and agency in urban India.

Paper long abstract

What might development look like if we began not from institutions or indicators, but from the temporal and relational worlds through which precarious households actually survive? Drawing on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork with Bengali Muslim migrant families in Gurgaon, India, this paper unsettles linear and technocratic narratives of progress, women's empowerment, and household decision making that dominate development discourse. Instead, it foregrounds a feminist and decolonial account of how households work as dynamic, translocal, and crisis ridden formations whose everyday negotiations far exceed the analytic frames imposed on them.

Tracing three contrasting household trajectories, one unraveling into permanent crisis, one achieving incremental upward mobility through exhaustive self discipline, and one producing fragile stability through gendered labour pooling, the paper shows that survival depends less on rational planning or individual empowerment than on relational improvisation, gendered bargaining, and continuous reconfiguration of work, care, and kinship ties. These temporal processes destabilize development imaginaries that privilege linear mobility, discrete interventions, or tidy outcomes.

Methodologically, the paper argues for feminist temporal ethnography as a mode of epistemic justice, a way of recognising forms of agency, refusal, and endurance that are invisible within policy frameworks. By centering households' own temporalities such as waiting, deferring, enduring, and recalibrating, it proposes a shift from measuring development to reworlding it, attending to the ethical, affective, and relational labour that sustains life under conditions that the development apparatus itself often produces.