Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at practice of ethnographic research in urban front-line spaces where gendered violence is negotiated by women in informal communities. It pays attention to the embodied techniques and epistemology that are developed by these women.

Paper long abstract:

This paper attempts to link two forms of violence: everyday and gendered violence in urban informal communities, and the epistemic violence of NGO and governmental discourse that attempts to understand and intervene in such forms of violence.

I draw from my ethnographic work in Dharavi (Mumbai), where I focus on women front-line workers who are engaged in an NGO's prevention of violence against women program. In the paper, I focus on the embodied techniques and epistemologies that these front-line workers develop to negotiate violence in their homes and communities. I draw a parallel between, and contrast, these epistemologies and the ones produced by non-governmental and governmental discourse, and explore how these epistemologies are hierarchized.

In reflecting on my role as an ethnographer among these front-line workers, however, I contend that there are ways in which such embodied front-line work can and do claim authority in understanding localized problems, and produce new forms of engagement and subjective positions among the workers.