Positionality in the field: embodied and relational dimensions

At the core of conducting field work in any discipline lies the inter-corporeal experience of ‘being there’.Footnote ²⁵ Positionality in the field emerges through identifying and analysing bodily encounters, emotional negotiations and the interaction of the self with the other in the field.Footnote ²⁶ The temporality of the field (when did the field begin and end), the material and spatial settings (home, office, laboratory) and embodied and emotional dimensions produced different experiences of the field, shaping conditions under which historical knowledge is produced.

These dynamics became visible during my fieldwork across multiple states in India. Over several weeks in 2023, I visited Assam, Bangalore, New Delhi, Pune and Mumbai. I also conducted remote interviews with participants from Bangladesh based in Dhaka, and with interviewees of Sri Lankan and Indian origin settled in the United States. As a ‘native researcher’, I was navigating what was, in many ways, familiar terrain. Tacit knowledge of urban spaces in India, familiarity with local codes of conduct, ability to switch between Hindi and English eased access and interaction.

Biographical proximity did not, however, dissolve gendered geographies within which the research unfolded. As a younger woman researcher, I had to exercise ongoing discernment and attention to my physical safety. While these risks mostly related to travelling to the interview sites rather than the interview itself, their mitigation still reveals that positional proximity is not additive but stratified and situational, enabling access along some axes (language, nationality) while constraining along others (gender, age). Despite evidence that researchers frequently under-report encounters of risk, such considerations form an integral yet under-acknowledged dimension of fieldwork.Footnote ²⁷ Institutional guidelines on gender-based safety protocols such as conducting interviews in public spaces or within office hours, and informing a third party of one’s location, proved practically and ethically inadequate. Interviewing researchers in the later stages of their lives and honouring choices to be interviewed at home required discretionary judgement. Such measures risked conferring suspicion on a research relation premised on trust and confidentiality. Institutional risk protocols designed for protection can inadvertently destabilise the relational ethics which underpins oral history research. Concerns around risks implicate researcher and interviewee alike; the act of inviting a stranger into one’s home or office highlighted that vulnerability in oral history is reciprocal.Footnote ²⁸ These negotiations often revealed that the ‘field’ begins prior to the interview encounter itself in anticipatory measures that structure the conditions of encounter.Footnote ²⁹ Positionality therefore extends beyond epistemic self-reflection into the embodied labour of maintaining self-efficacy and relational trust as a researcher.

Once the interviews began, the spatial environments shaped where and how interviews took place and the kinds of interactions that became possible. Each interview site carried its own material and symbolic meanings. For narrators, particularly those interviewed after retirement, the home offered comfort and familiarity in which life stories could be shared at their own pace. Interviews conducted at home also offered insights into family lives: personal artefacts, such as photographs of family members, drawings by grandchildren, the sounds of household life continuing during the interview, the presence of family pets rendered visible dimensions of interviewees’ lives that extended beyond their professional careers.

By contrast, interviews conducted at institutional spaces took on a more formal character. At the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR, Bangalore) and the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA, Pune) formal registration procedures situated the encounter within a setting that foregrounded the interviewees’ identities as scientists and institutional figures. As key sites of postcolonial scientific nation-building, these institutions brought questions of scientific contribution, expertise and knowledge production to the fore in ways that differed from interviews conducted at home. The interviewee’s office was typically marked by ceremonial displays of degree certificates, awards and memorabilia. By contrast, in domestic settings, the personal and the scientific coexisted more visibly, opening space for familial and biographical dimensions of the life-history interviews to emerge alongside accounts of their scientific careers. Across both settings, the material and spatial environment offered visual testimony to the transnational dimensions of scientific careers that structured the project’s broader inquiry.

Emotional negotiation constituted an important dimension of positionality as well. In oral history, risks and opportunities also arise from the interpersonal relationships formed with narrators.Footnote ³⁰ These encounters involve navigating the boundaries between being ‘too close’ and ‘too distant’, raising questions about achieving ‘balance’ during fieldwork.Footnote ³¹ Rather than viewing this as a methodological dilemma to be resolved, I argue that such tensions are constitutive of knowledge production. Closeness may facilitate disclosure but risk over-identification, while distance may preserve analytical clarity but constrain narrative depth. It is through the movement between these positions that meaning emerges. One interview, in particular, produced moments of what Penny Summerfield has called ‘emotional discomposure’, when the social anthropologist Meenaxi Barkataki-Ruscheweyh unexpectedly turned to her mother’s imprisonment during the Emergency in India.Footnote ³² Questions about school and childhood memories prompted reflections on political repression and personal trauma: ‘My mother went to jail, and she came back 22 months later … I mean, that was the end of my childhood at nine years old, because suddenly the whole world turned upside down.’

The shift illustrates how seemingly ordinary prompts can open onto political and affective histories, revealing the temporality of memory. Within this interview encounter, Meenaxi’s emotion was also embodied through changes in voice and tone, posture and gaze. The inter-corporeal expressions situated emotion as both narrative content and embodied practice. Alistair Thomson noted how the interviewer’s emotions intersect with and shape the narrator’s storytelling during the encounter, suggesting that emotional exchange is co-produced rather than unidirectional.Footnote ³³

My insider positionality shaped the emotional dynamics of this specific interview by facilitating narrative disclosure and the interviewee’s willingness to recount politically sensitive and personally painful memories. Meenaxi and I are both from Guwahati, Assam, a shared background that extended any sense of insider positionality beyond a broader South Asian affiliation. Shared regional reference points meant that political events, such as the partition of India in 1947, the Emergency of the 1970s and the ‘double rupture’ of Bangladesh statehood (1947 and 1971) were discussed without extended explanation.Footnote ³⁴ Stories were often told at a level of cultural shorthand that presumed familiarity, influencing both the telling of these stories and their interpretation. However, it also created conditions for emotional discomposure. As Summerfield argues, while the storyteller’s goal is often to achieve composure or integration, discomposure may be a common outcome. Uncertainties or tragedies can often put ‘composure at risk’ and challenge the neatness of oral history research.Footnote ³⁵ Even interviews built on assumed shared identity offered no guarantee of full access to interviewees’ emotional experience. As such, there remains a limit to how far insider positionality can bridge interpretative distance.

Alongside the dynamics of disclosure, discomposure and emotional negotiation, other interviews were marked by moments of reticence. In oral history, reticence has been understood as interviewees’ reluctance or unwillingness to discuss certain topics. Yet it can equally be read as interviewees deciding what they consider relevant and appropriate for the public record.Footnote ³⁶ In the interviews discussed here, reticence more often reflected agency than reluctance. Interviewees occasionally arrived at experiences of personal trauma and loss, including illness, bereavement, physical injury and ageing, before redirecting the conversation towards narratives of their scientific careers. These choices were shaped by their understanding of both the purpose of the interview and my role as a researcher recording the life histories of South Asian scientists. As interviewees were aware that the interviews were intended for archival deposit at the British Library, they managed self-disclosure accordingly, presenting themselves primarily as scientists and researchers while maintaining a degree of personal reserve. The interview encounter was principally understood as the documentation of a scientific life for future generations of scientists, researchers and the wider public, even as personal experiences remained interwoven throughout these narratives.

The contrast between in-person and remote interviews further illuminated the inter-corporeal, embodied and affective nature of positionality. The lack of a shared physical space in online interviews restricted access to the interview environment and often required more time to build rapport and trust with participants. As Katherine Waugh has argued, conducting oral history interviews using video-calling software presents distinct challenges for eliciting memory and emotions.Footnote ³⁷ However, remote interviews expanded the geographical reach of the project, enabling engagement with interviewees beyond India and the UK. At the same time, the disembodied nature of remote interviews highlighted that positionality remains a dynamic element that also varies across modes of interaction.

The transcription of interviews also varied across these modes. In in-person interviews, observations of non-verbal communication, such as gestures, silences and pauses were recorded in fieldnotes to supplement the audio transcript. In remote video interviews, visual access to the interviewee was limited to what was visible on screen, constraining the range of non-verbal communication available compared to in-person encounters. Nonetheless, for both in-person and remote interviews, the review of transcripts drew on what Kathryn Anderson and Dana C. Jack describe as a method of ‘rummaging through an old attic’, involving careful, iterative listening through probing, comparing and revisiting the material to find new insights.Footnote ³⁸ Alongside the transcripts, I periodically re-listened to original recordings to capture the tone, pacing and inflexion of orally conveyed information and returned to fieldnotes during the process of analysis.

Insiderness and intersubjectivity

As we have already seen, relationships between researcher and participant were shaped by multiple, shifting identities. My positionality changed in relation to each interlocutor, with different dimensions becoming more or less salient. In this section, I reflect on several such axes of identity: gender, the middle-class Indian family as a mediating force shaping childhood and aspirations for academic mobility, regionality as a distinct Assamese ethno-cultural identity and religion as a form of everyday practice. These categories did not operate uniformly. Rather, they intersected differently with every interview, producing varying degrees of proximity and distance that complicated any claim to insider status. I also remained attentive to how implicit assumptions of shared understanding can cause either overinterpretation or misunderstanding during the subsequent data analysis.

My overlapping cultural reference points shaped the interview encounter in unexpected ways. This was most evident with the three interviewees from Assam, who, like me, had broadly similar educational trajectories. Shared gendered and regional experiences produced moments of intersubjective recognition in which I was positioned as someone who already ‘knew’. When recounting stories of family, Meenaxi commented, ‘you would understand as an only daughter’. The comment alluded to a brief personal exchange about childhood and family before the interview had formally started. In that moment, Meenaxi appeared to situate me within her life story. Although a single aside cannot, in itself, sustain a claim to insider status, the broader interview was underpinned by a wider assumption of shared knowledge of gendered expectations and educational aspirations, with Meenaxi shifting between English and Assamese in narrating her experiences.

While ethno-cultural familiarity and gender affinity facilitated rapport, I remained cautious of the politics of biographical sameness and the oversimplification of gendered subordination as a uniform experience.Footnote ³⁹ Such assumptions can ignore critical differences among women in terms of social class, status, sexual orientation, politics, age and other axes of difference. A key analytical challenge lay in recognising how my positionality shaped by gender affinities and epistemic orientations informed by feminist, intersectional and postcolonial theory structured my interpretation of the life stories. My conceptual framing risked approaching women’s accounts with predetermined expectations, shaped by an awareness of the structural marginalisation of women in science. For example, there is an implicit expectation in gender studies to foreground the struggles of women in male-dominated fields. As a woman of colour, I found myself presuming that women’s accounts of studying and ‘doing’ science in India and Britain would reflect the forms of gendered and racialised exclusion discussed in gender studies and the history of science.

These expectations, however, risked inadvertently essentialising women’s experiences. The interviewees differed markedly in how they understood the relationship between gender and scientific achievement. While one interviewee foregrounded individual effort and ambition over gender barriers in science, others focused on the institutionalised gendered hierarchies which structured their experiences in Britain and in India. These divergences complicated any singular reading of ‘women in science’ in my project. A related interpretative challenge appears in Abha Sur’s life-history interview with the prominent Indian physicist Anna Mani. When asked about women’s experience in science, Mani responded ‘What is this hoopla about women and science? It must be getting difficult for women to do science these days. We had no such problems in our time.’Footnote ⁴⁰ As Sur observed, ‘we’ referred primarily to women from upper socio-economic backgrounds with access to educational and material resources. She also argued that Mani’s refusal to foreground the role of gender in science was a form of resistance to identities imposed on women by wider society.Footnote ⁴¹

Besides gendered affinities, my ethno-racial proximity, interviewing ‘one’s own people’ in Assam shaped the interview encounter. Speaking Assamese in a local dialect prior to the interview helped build rapport and crucially, enabled me to apprehend the implicit socio-cultural, religious and familial references through which memories were narrated. Shared linguistic and cultural repertoires reduced the need for extended contextualisation. References to proverbs, aphorisms, ritual practices and shared childhood experiences generated moments of shared recognition. Reflecting on the ‘gohaighor’ (a small domestic religious space within the home) Amarjyoti Choudhury, a physicist who had studied at Oxford in the mid-1970s, shared this about his upbringing:

My familiarity with these religious references meant that they were immediately intelligible to me, allowing the conversation to proceed without extended explanation. At the same time, Amarjyoti’s memory signalled a particular mode of domestic piety through which his childhood was remembered and narrated. Insiderness in this instance lay in the cultural legibility of the family as the central unit influencing education, devotion and selfhood. As elsewhere, I remained attuned to the risks of cultural determinism. Assamese identity is neither homogeneous nor singular as the variations of class, caste and religious affiliation produce diverse experiences of childhood within the same region. To the extent that I occupied an insider position, I also recognised that the knowledge produced was not more authentic, only differently configured. Shared regional belonging and a sense of responsibility towards the community provided another basis for identification between researcher and interviewee. Several interviewees articulated a strong attachment to Assam as a site of return and contribution. Anupam Saikia, who received his PhD in mathematics from Trinity College, Cambridge in 2001, reflected:

Here, belonging was more than nostalgia. It emerged as a form of ethical responsibility to one’s local community, which motivated most of the interviewees in my research to return. This sense of responsibility is socially produced and mediated through expectations from local communities and families, while also being internalised as a duty and a form of accountability.Footnote ⁴² The interviewee’s reference to ‘our society’ invoked a collective Assamese obligation that simultaneously positioned me within that collective and produced an assumed insiderness, alongside shared responsibility towards the region’s developmental concerns. Return is thus framed as both contribution and personal fulfilment, contrasting life abroad as self-directed and ultimately insufficient. Shared knowledge of Assam’s economic marginality enabled the conversation to move into questions of value, inequality and responsibility, fostering a connection between interviewer and interviewee. Similar intersubjectivity was also created through discussions of family. The middle-class Indian family emerged in many interviews as a vehicle for social mobility and respectability, with overseas education functioning as a strategy for further upward mobility. Because my own biography mirrors this trajectory, discussions of family were frequently narrated in ways that generated a sense of biographical resonance. Family was described as a source of emotional and economic support, shaping not only opportunities for social mobility but also expectations of return.Footnote ⁴³

The limits of this proximity became clear in my interview with Athula Buddhagosha Attygalle, a Sri Lankan professor of mass spectrometry who had obtained a PhD in chemistry from Keele University in 1983. Beyond our shared experiences of being South Asian overseas students in Britain, our biographies diverged across nationality, discipline and generation. I found it more difficult to connect with Athula’s account of his childhood and schooling in the southern coastal city of Galle, and his subsequent scientific training in Sri Lanka, than with those of the interviewees from Assam, given my lack of comparable tacit knowledge or lived experience of either context. Despite the geographical proximity, a sense of shared South Asian identity felt relatively distant. The category of South Asianness may have reduced some initial social distance within the interview encounter, but it did not erase the contingencies of nationality, time and lived experience.

The intersubjective dynamics of these encounters were also manifested through reciprocal questions interviewees directed to me, and their nature shifted across the course of the interview. At the outset, questions centred on the project itself, ‘what is this for’ and ‘who will listen to this’. The significant generational distance between me and my interviewees did not produce a mentor-student dynamic but emerged through reminiscence as interviewees frequently marked the temporal gap with phrases such as ‘in those days’, ‘back then’, ‘way before this’, naturally orienting their accounts to a younger researcher who had not lived through the period being documented. By the close of the interview, interviewees were posing the same questions of mobility, belonging and return that had structured their own accounts: ‘are you British or Indian’, ‘where is your family now’, ‘do you plan to live there long term’, extending the expectation of return to me. These exchanges reveal that insider status is always negotiated, that it is no panacea, and that oral historians must remain attentive to emotion and vulnerability in encounters shaped by biographical and generational differences.

The limits of insiderness: experiential and temporal outsider

A researcher’s philosophy, personal experiences and interpretative frameworks have an impact on both research process and outcomes. My research is no exception in that my theoretical positionality, the engagement with decolonial and postcolonial history, the use of life-history as a method of collecting data, the choices of languages and the nature of the questions posed, all informed how stories were elicited and interpreted. Insiderness, therefore, functioned as a double-edged sword where shared social location facilitated rapport, but also risked projecting my own experience and using it as the lens to view interviewees’ accounts.Footnote ⁴⁴ I remained attentive to the possibility of reading accounts of academic mobility primarily through a framework of moral and ethical obligation when interviewees were, at times, articulating personal ambitions in more individual terms.

Interviews with Bangladeshi scientists who returned home in the aftermath of the 1971 Liberation War exposed a different limit. Their accounts of return were embedded in memories of political violence, displacement and national reconstitution, experiences I had not lived. I was also a temporal outsider collecting narratives shaped by generational experiences that preceded my own by several decades, and which I encountered only through the mediation of historical research. This layered unevenness of cultural proximity alongside experiential and temporal distance shaped the interpretation of the narratives.

Muhammad Ibrahim, who completed his PhD in surface physics at the University of Southampton in 1972, described resisting political violence through ‘dreaming’, ‘writing’ and ‘lecturing’ as forms of peaceful dissent. For him, his return home required no justification:

His narrative of return, shaped by the experiences of the Bangladesh Liberation War, also revealed moments where my assumed South Asianness was insufficient. While shared regional reference points facilitated initial proximity and rapport, they did not grant access to the lived political experiences through which Bangladeshi national identity was formed.Footnote ⁴⁵ Rather than presuming shared understanding, I had to recognise that the moral weight of ‘return’ in his account emerged from participation in events I knew only through history.

While the Bangladeshi interviews exposed the limits of experiential proximity, interviews with Indian scientists revealed a different configuration of insiderness and distance. Many Indian interviewees had returned during the expansion of national scientific institutions in the 1970s and 1980s, when state-led investment in technoscience, nuclear research and space programmes reshaped India’s pursuit of non-alignment during the Cold War era.Footnote ⁴⁶ Their narratives of return were embedded in projects of scientific nationalism rather than political rupture. As a historian of science concerned with how scientific knowledge is produced, I did not share my interviewees’ commitment to scientific nationalism; instead I approached it as an object of historical analysis.

Jayant Narlikar, an astrophysicist who completed his PhD in cosmology at Cambridge in 1963 and later became the founder-director of the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA, Pune), described his return at a moment of techno-political expansion:

Unlike Bangladeshi accounts structured around war and displacement, Jayant’s account of return to India was shaped by postcolonial aspirations and scientific nationalism. Established in 1945, the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) cultivated an ethos of nation-building that was designed to lure back British-trained Indian scientists. Earlier generations of scientists, most notably Homi Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai, had returned during the Second World War after training at the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge.Footnote ⁴⁷ Their trajectories created institutional and symbolic precedents for later generations of scientists like Jayant, who understood their own return as part of a larger nation-building project.Footnote ⁴⁸ Here, my South Asianness operated differently. Shared national and regional reference points facilitated rapport and cultural recognition, but they did not extend into the elite institutional networks through which scientific authority was established.

A similar dynamic emerged in the account of Dilip Bhawalkar whose career trajectory likewise unfolded within the growing network of India’s postcolonial scientific institutions. After completing an MSc in electronics and a PhD in laser physics from the University of Southampton in 1966, Dilip briefly taught there before returning to India to join the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) in Bombay as a Scientific Officer. Dilip recalled:

The telegram from Ramanna illustrates how recruitment into India’s postcolonial scientific institutions operated through elite personal networks, a defining feature of the technopolitical project at the time. Many of the scientists I interviewed, particularly Jayant and Dilip, occupied positions of authority within this small but influential scientific elite. While a common national and regional identity (Indian/South Asian) facilitated a degree of proximity and recognition, these institutional practices and political processes through which scientific authority and legitimacy were constituted remained largely inaccessible to me as a historian of science.

Although the experiences of returning Bangladeshi scientists differed from those of their Indian and Sri Lankan counterparts, broader affinities shaped postcolonial subjectivities across the region. These experiences, while rooted in specific national histories, were also embedded in shared histories of colonisation, independence and nation-building, and of social and epistemic marginalisation. In this sense, Ibrahim’s narrative is both particular to Bangladesh and emblematic of a broader postcolonial condition expressed in common trajectories of migration, from postgraduate training at British universities, through the negotiation of ‘staying away’ or ‘returning back’, to careers shaped by personal aspirations to contribute to institution-building at home. In recognising these resonances, I became aware of how my own South Asian background positioned me closer to the insider continuum, through cultural sameness and broader historical and epistemic familiarity with the postcolonial condition that shaped many of my interviewees’ lives. At the same time, South Asianness as a regional category was itself produced through colonial administrative and classificatory practices rather than emerging from the region. Therefore, South Asianness here refers to shared experiences of and resistance to colonisation, and to the trajectories of overseas training, migration and return that followed, rather than an assumption of homogeneous South Asian identity.Footnote ⁴⁹

Conclusion: towards a reflexive practice

The comment problematises the a priori and normative assumption that social, demographic and cultural attributes based on my shared South Asianness were sufficient to establish insider positionality. Drawing on my research, it examines the dialectic of being simultaneously an insider through ethno-racial, linguistic and gendered affinities and an outsider in relation to generational differences and lived experiences of political ruptures. Rather than treating insider and outsider positionality as stable methodological and epistemological conditions, the analysis attends to the shifting degrees of insiderness within specific interview encounters.

Awareness of insider–outsider positionality is particularly important when researching marginalised groups, yet even in those contexts researchers cannot occupy either position in any absolute sense. The examples I have drawn on for this comment highlight the shifting, relational and situational nature of research encounters.Footnote ⁵⁰ While my research shows that ‘insider’ oral history cannot be empirically sustained as a stable position, neither position can realistically function as a fixed identity. Historians must pay attention to the ways their shifting positions – including their own disciplinary training and background – shape the production of historical knowledge.

Throughout my research, especially post-field and in the writing of my analysis, I became increasingly attuned to the effects of my positionality by acknowledging the partiality and limits of either/or (insider/outsider) perspectives. I examined how structural and spatial locations, as well as power relations between me and my interviewees shaped the production of knowledge. My initial stance as an ‘insider’ before the interview commenced proved to be more ‘assumed’ during data analysis. This required reflexively situating and historicising what Pierre Bourdieu describes as one’s ‘scholastic point of view’, that is the interpretative framings, intellectual dispositions and analytical habits shaped by disciplinary training as a historian, in order to avoid collapsing into subjectivism or relativism.Footnote ⁵¹ This involves interrogating the three orders of presupposition: my social origins and trajectory as a researcher, my position within the academic field of global history, and the scholastic dispositions and unthought assumptions that this disciplinary training had shaped.Footnote ⁵² Therefore, mobilising concepts from ethnography, oral history and sociology enabled me to work with ‘multiple perspectives’,Footnote ⁵³ while remaining critically aware of my own historicity and continuously reflecting on the conditions and frames of my own modes of thought as a necessary condition for the production of reflexive historical knowledge.

Approaching oral history as both a methodological and analytical framework meant treating interviews as sites of knowledge production rather than data collection. As Indira Chowdhury observes, oral history captures an essential ‘layer of historicity’ that emerges through interaction between the historian of science and the scientist.Footnote ⁵⁴ In my study, this ‘layer’ was shaped by a shifting configuration of proximity and distance across encounters. Meaning was co-produced within relational conditions that were historically situated and uneven. This raises the question of how it is possible to establish a research relationship in ways that minimise the ‘symbolic violence’ embedded in asymmetrical power relations in terms of the researcher’s authority to frame, record and interpret interviewees’ account.Footnote ⁵⁵ My interviews prompted the recurring paradox of ‘do I have to be one to know one?’Footnote ⁵⁶ While shared regional, linguistic and cultural affiliations created common ground, in-group membership is not a prerequisite for eliciting emotionally resonant narratives or ensuring interpretative depth. Empathy and trust, after all, emerge through ethical engagement rather than demographic sameness.

Declarative acknowledgements of positionality risk becoming formulaic if not accompanied by sustained methodological interrogation and persistent self-reflection. This comment has sought to address this risk by tracing the proximity and distance that operated across specific interview encounters rather than asserting insider status in advance. Insider oral history cannot be sustained as a fixed empirical and epistemological category but must instead be understood as a contingent and historically situated condition, which is always limited and can never be absolute.