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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.
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.