糖心传媒

Educational research is never neutral. It is shaped by who we are, where we stand, and how we are seen. My recent fieldwork in rural Sindh brought this reality into sharp focus. It was my first sustained period of research in a rural setting in Pakistan, and I entered the field acutely aware of my dual insider- outsider position. I am Pakistani, I speak Urdu (the national language) and even understand some basic Sindhi, the local language. I also understand the political and cultural structures (both historical and contemporary) that shape the country and province of Sindh. But I grew up in Karachi, which while the capital of Sindh, is a metropolitan megacity, and a social, economic and cultural melting pot in the country. I was educated in elite institutions (studying British curricula) shaped by colonial legacies, and later studied abroad. I am both from the context and distant from it. 

The tension between belonging and distance accompanied me from the start. Driving to the fieldwork context, I took photographs from the car window both of the rural scenery – mustard fields and guava groves, mud-brick homes, and distant shots of people 鈥� and urbanised communities with levels of development that surprised me. While doing so, I started questioning myself. Was I 鈥榓estheticising鈥� rural ontologies by turning harsh lived realities into picturesque frames? Concurrently, to what extent was I an outsider that the urbanisation was so surprising to me? I realised that my gaze was shaped by urban privilege and possible learnt bias and, albeit unintentionally, I was entering the rural field with an 鈥榦thering鈥� gaze.

This recognition came through a process of critical reflexivity, one that was neither singular, nor comfortable. Positionality, often viewed as necessary paragraphs to be inserted into methodology sections, is in fact a visceral, relational phenomenon that impacts how we enter and act in the field. It is a continuous, uncomfortable process of interrogating the assumptions that travel with us into the field. It informs what we say and how we interpret words, actions, and silences, how we respond to gestures (perhaps of hospitality) from participants, how we present ourselves to our participants.

In the field, I expected to encounter gender inequalities that are structurally and socially entrenched in Pakistan, and visible in everyday interactions. They shape social structures 鈥� such as access to education and employment 鈥� and socio-cultural practices that predominantly quieten women鈥檚 voices. I carried this knowledge consciously, but without聽 recognising how deeply it had sedimented into the lens I brought to the field: when I met women educators, I expected stories of gendered constraint. While inequalities were evident -particularly in the number of women and children involved in strenuous physical labour, and in the fact that most of the women educators reported to men- I also met agentic women who were self-actualising and strategically navigating the environment and systems they were operating in. I met women teachers who were vividly articulate about how they created impactful practice in highly resource-constrained environments, and female government officials who commanded authority in rooms filled with men. Perhaps the most outstanding example was our local research assistant 鈥� a woman- who was also our gatekeeper in the field, navigating all our field requirements from access to government officials, logistics of travel, and training note-takers.聽

I recognise that these women may be anomalies to hierarchical patriarchy, most critically, because they were educated. Nonetheless they challenged dominant narratives that frame rural Pakistani women as passive subjects of patriarchy, flattening the complexities of lived experiences. While structural inequalities undeniably exist, foregrounding them unquestioningly obscures everyday acts of actualisation, resistance, and negotiation. My own surprise at encountering such manifestations of female agency in the rural field context was itself revealing by making me question the epistemic frameworks I had internalised.

As a researcher of comparative and international education, a native of a postcolonial society, I consider myself sensitive to and critical of the colonial genealogies that shape knowledge production. In particular, such shaping tends to highlight inequalities and injustices in the global south, without sufficiently engaging with the complexities of southern lived experiences. By doing so, it creates deficit discourses that serve to reify those very same inequities. However, I realised in this field experience that my own educational and lived experiences 鈥� shaped by those same influences 鈥� had created a deeply embedded bias that I had to let go off and view my context with fresh, situated lens. Critical reflexivity demands turning such an analytic gaze onto ourselves. In order to do this, I recorded my moments of realisation as data about my context and myself, and created an ongoing practice of reflection and self-questioning when I engaged with the data. I adopted consistent and ongoing practices that I internally labelled 鈥榗atch your bias鈥�.聽

Through such practices, I realised that my understanding of gendered lived realities in that setting had also become overly deterministic. I was overlooking the nuanced, context-specific ways in which women can exercise power. This does not mean romanticising agency or denying constraint. Rather, it means holding both simultaneously: acknowledging structural gendered inequalities while recognising women鈥檚 capacity to act within, against, and beyond those structures. Such thinking challenges existing binaries in development discourses e.g., rural/urban, traditional/ modern, oppressed/empowered. 

The process of being critically reflexive then, is an ethical necessity requiring us to question how our social identity 鈥� in my case class, gender, education, and location- mediates what we see and fail to see. It can create moments of discomfort (indeed it likely always does) but also pathways for deeper understanding of ourselves and our context. It can come in fleeting moments – such as while taking pictures from the car, in pauses during data collection, and while reflecting on field notes 鈥� that demand recognition and reflection by the researcher. This process was a deeply moving one for me reinforcing that ultimately, awareness of positionality is about cultivating humility. It is about entering the field with openness to being unsettled and letting the field speak back to us.

Camilla Hadi Chaudhary

Camilla H. Chaudhary is a researcher at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge whose work focuses on educational inclusion, education policy, school leadership, and climate justice education, particularly in low-income communities. Drawing on social justice theories and southern knowledge frameworks, her research foregrounds situated knowledges and more diverse ways of thinking about education. She is co-founder of the South Asian Approaches to Researching Education (SAARE) Network, which explores context-driven approaches to educational research in South Asia, and is a member of the 糖心传媒, serving on its Executive Team. She also serves as Associate Editor of the Cambridge Journal of Education.