Situated Practice

Research that starts in a specific place and stays close to the ground.

In Bidar, the mesh network was inseparable from the communities hosting it. The women whose oral practices it was meant to serve were collaborators, not “users.” In Wayanad, a literature review on the disenfranchisement of the Paniya, centuries of enslavement, landlessness, and exclusion from education, became the ground for a storytelling tool that asked Adivasi children to imagine futures for themselves, using elephants from their own Vattakalli dance tradition.

In rural Bihar, participatory mapping in Kishanganj showed how caste shapes school placement, village infrastructure, and what parents let themselves hope for their children. In Koramangala, the method was just attentiveness: the buffaloes that pass at dawn, the sanitation workers, the garbage trucks, the rhythms of a neighbourhood most people only see as a tech hub.

Mapping the migratory routes of pastoralists across India combined GIS with the shepherds’ own knowledge, making visible land-use patterns that policy is disrupting. The climate resource centre in Bidar collected the seasonal knowledge, care practices, and mythic narratives farming communities use to read ecological change.

Care-full Collectives is the longer, academic version of the same commitment: care as what holds these networks together.