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relational and social context of my embeddedness in the local community. My personal history, long standing relationships with diverse stakeholders and the community, which predate my research, were crucial to engaging people in dialogical processes around community, conflict, and youth. In contexts like the Garo Hills where much social suffering is normalized, naturalized, and/or silenced, it is imperative to speak up and to create/open up a public discourse around those issues; and I wanted my research to be a vehicle for achieving that. Throughout the duration of my fieldwork, I attended public meetings, volunteered in youth-related events, gave talks, and presented papers at the local university campus although I should note that this active community involvement was not motivated by its instrumentality to my research. It was a natural extension of what has been my typical relationship with my home community.
My prior research as well as my experiences in the local community provided me with some crucial insights that informed the manner in which I tried to engage the perspectives of youth during my dissertation fieldwork. In the course of my ethnographic engagement, I noted that the local Garo community holds a rather disempowering view of their youth, viewing them as incapable of any meaningful engagement with community issues. These views were at times appropriated by Garo youth themselves. I also noted the absence of spaces where young people could critically reflect on local community issues without being drawn into polarized ethnic discourses. Thus, I recognized that in order to secure meaningful participation of Garo youth, I would have to create conditions for these young people to participate on more equal terms. Instead of trying to force youth into traditional adult spaces, there was a need to innovate, to inculcate a sense of belonging and ownership. I tried to achieve this in a number of ways throughout our engagement. During the early stages this involved:
• Approaching youth organizations and speaking to their leaders and members instead of trying to secure participation directly through colleges.
• Talking to individuals that I met in the course of my participation in the wider community about my project and assessing their interest in sharing their experiences.
• Being explicit about my personal history and sharing some of the underlying motivation for the project.
• Talking about traditional distinctions between researchers and research, offering a critique of that model followed by how the interactions I proposed would be different.
• Positioning potential participants as experts of their lives and life circumstances, arguing that they have access to knowledge and experiences that contribute to unique perspectives. The process through which I engaged non-tribal youth differed significantly from that of Garo youth. Many non-tribal youth have come to accept the routineness of the everyday violence tied
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to the conflict. These issues emerged in informal conversations with non-tribal youth. However, when I tried to engage those very youth in sharing their perspectives more extensively as part of my project, they expressed their discomfort. I discovered that it was not only the conflict that was normalized, but also the fear of violence. Despite the clause of anonymity, speaking up and speaking out were viewed as too risky. Eventually I interviewed a non-tribal male youth who was known to my family. He trusted my parents enough to agree to talk to me. In the course of our conversations, he became increasingly engaged and talked about it to some of his peers, who also became interested in an opportunity to talk about experiences that they could not do elsewhere.
As far as key stakeholders were concerned, I identified them based on considerations of the local context (my knowledge of it) and leads from the interviews/discussions with youth. I already knew some of them by virtue of having lived in Garo Hills. I contacted some of them through my parents’ social/work networks, and through my other community-based experiences. In the identification of stakeholders, I used a purposeful or “information rich” sampling approach (Patton, 2002, p.230).
1.3.2. The Research Process Fieldwork Activities
I carried out my 11month long dissertation fieldwork in Garo Hills region of Northeast India between September 2009 and August 2010. This project however grew out of five years’ ethnographic engagement with the region and a longer personal history that I have discussed in the previous chapter. It evolved out of master’s thesis during 2004-05 when I became interested in the phenomenon of insurgencies in Northeast India and the narratives of young men who fought them. It was my first foray into what transformed into really burning questions that continued to animate my research engagement. Given the nature of my positionality and methodological orientation, while in the field, the lines between research, action/intervention, and community involvement were often blurred. Nevertheless, I organize my activities (in addition to my participation in the wider community) in terms of the following categories in order to give the reader a sense of how the data were collected:
i) Organizing group sessions for youth: The goal for those sessions was to allow small groups to develop organically across several sessions (Appendices F and G). The format for the sessions was flexible and varied in structure, ranging from more of a group interview to extensive conversations and dialogue around community issues. This involved selecting places that were easily accessible, likely to ensure privacy and comfort for the participants involved. I often involved potential participants to
44 brainstorm appropriate places.
ii) In-depth interviews with youth: I conducted multiple in-depth interviews over the course of the project with both Garo and non-tribal youth (Appendix H). The goal was to secure their perspectives and illuminate their pragmatic with regard to ethnic identity and conflict.
iii) Interviews with key stakeholders: I interviewed other key social actors who are implicated in local community issues (Appendix I). These were completed in single sessions.
iv) Facilitation of youth-led community engagement project: I worked on a participatory action research project with a group of ten young people. As part of the project, I attempted to create a context of inclusive participation to explore how young people engage and potentially renegotiate their sense of identity and community in such contexts. I facilitated and scaffolded their learning process as they reflected critically on local community concerns, developed research questions, acquired basic research skills, gathered data and analyzed it, and dissemination of their findings. Chapter 4 details these processes.
v) Collection of materials: I gathered a range of textual and visual materials, e.g. historical archives, annual reports, published and unpublished scholarly texts about Garo history and culture from my participants, from educational institutions, libraries, government offices, personal communication. I used these materials to supplement the primary data illuminating discursive practices.
Data Sources, Analysis, and Writing
My analysis and writing (Chapters 2, 3, and 4) reflect the multimodal approach that I employed in my fieldwork activities. I worked with interview transcripts, conversation/discussion transcripts, my observations and field notes, newspaper articles that were published during my fieldwork, written notes and schematic diagrams from participants, and other texts/maps that I collected. I began primarily with audio-recordings, interview/discussion transcripts, and field notes. As I reviewed the transcripts and wrote analytic memos on the interview transcripts and field notes, I became aware of certain clusters that corresponded to an interesting array of interpretations that the youth had about their sociopolitical environments (e.g., theorization of ethnic conflict by non-tribal youth, theorization of youth violence by Garo tribal youth, youth perspectives on local community development). I worked with these clusters trying to elucidate the themes around which they were organized. I then began to work across clusters and materials so as to elaborate and contextualize the themes. An example of this process is the juxtaposition of
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the experiences of non-tribal youth as 'ethnic others' with reflections on the issue by Garo youth and other stakeholders.
I was also interested discourses and discursive practices related to protracted ethnic conflict and violence in Garo Hills. While, I examined the data to discover regularities in how my participants narrated their everyday experiences of conflict (Hymes, 1986), I was more keen on critical (Foucauldian) discourse analysis that would elucidate the societal level narratives that young people’s stories draw from and also how those narratives are implicated in perpetuating, reinforcing, and/or resisting marginalization and conflict. I examined discursive resources (in the form of narratives, metaphors, rhetoric, social categories) that are available to youth, how they deploy them, to what end and the broader institutional contexts that shape such deployment (Potter, 2003; Wetherell, 1998). I used both narrative and contextual analyses to unpack the richness of the material and to explore the array of possible meanings.