Vatsal
Tewari

Conducted sustained multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork across Self-Help Groups in the Udaipur zone among the most intensive qualitative datasets in the project. Moved between observation, formal interviewing, and informal presence to build longitudinal relationships with respondents.

Qualitative data analysis (QDA) was conducted through a deliberate hybrid methodology: API-assisted rapid first-pass coding for thematic identification across the full corpus, meshed with long, unhurried manual re-immersion in the data reading slowly, sitting with contradictions, following threads the algorithm surfaces but cannot interpret. The two registers inform each other rather than replace one another.

The data feeds directly into the RCT running parallel to the ethnography, producing a texture the trial alone cannot capture.

Active fieldwork ongoing. The site extends the comparative scope of the digital empowerment research to a distinct ecological and socio-economic context — tracking how access, aspiration, and structural constraint differ across geographies that policy often treats as uniform.

Work here is deliberately slower: establishing rapport, mapping the informal social infrastructure of SHGs before asking questions, and letting the field shape the questions rather than the other way around.

Ethnographic fieldwork and interviews examining how intensified surveillance reshapes emotional lives, everyday trust, and lived anxieties in border-adjacent communities. Affiliated with the Border Criminologies Network, Faculty of Law, University of Oxford.

Working paper under preparation post presentation at the University of Cambridge Border Criminologies Annual Workshop (September 2025).