A few months ago, I attended a workshop by Richa Nagar on her body of feminist works . The conversation was about the politics of knowledge production in academia. Richa reflected on her years of engagement with communities on what it takes to co-make and co-author knowledge for justice without seeking fixed answers. At the root of it, this process of trust-building involved empathy and care.
Nagar’s work, in this sense, is guided by friendships (although not explicitly stated). As someone who’s trying to tread a fine balance between research and practice, my primary takeaway from the workshop was to reflect on such a nature of engagement with her own research.
A few days after this workshop, I came across an anthology of stories called Yaari. It could not have been more timely. Let me, however, put this disclaimer upfront. This note is not a review of the anthology. I will not do right by the deeply personal reflections and visions of friendships narrated in this volume. Rather, I situate myself as a researcher-practitioner who is reflecting on how the idea of empathy and care extend to their own professional ambitions.
Yaari is a collection of stories on friendships by women and queer folx in South Asia. In their day-to-day, these individuals are also development sector practitioners, activists, and journalists; some of them are teachers and scholars, and others are poets and artists. Their 90+ contributions come in different forms and lengths “just as friendship itself resist definition”, as the editors point out.
Phadke and Kanagasabai, who brought this idea to life during a time when the world was in a pandemic-induced lockdown (or locked-out?), are academics and, of course, friends, who, together, found a ‘gap’ in the existing scholarship on friendships. They noticed that most of the feminist scholarship on women in South Asia focussed on family and kinship networks, and popular media on male friendships. By deciding to collect these stories by women and queer folx, then, also suggests a deliberate marking of their political identities, which exist at the margins and are underrepresented.
These narratives of friendships depict its various contours as well. From friendship that embodies grief, longing and loss and distance, disappointment and rage to friendships forged across cities, spaces and conversations and virtual realities, technologies, and connections, all the 9 themes of the book convey authors’ journeys and reflections on friendship. The diverse form of these stories not only celebrate these chosen networks but also explore the deeply political connections we sometimes forge, resist, or reconsider through these networks.
Academic disciplines often ‘discipline’ us into fitting our engagement with communities into tight and neat boxes of methods. But, does this process involve meaning-making through the lens of empathy and care? I am of the view that this upsets the objectivity academic training instils upon us. In fact, honing a friendship in such a set-up can challenge the position of power of the researcher (research participants are also referred to as research “subjects”!).
Stories in Yaari, in this vein, challenge this narrative. Although personal, the representations of friendship in this volume help a researcher-practitioner like me to reflect on the value of mutual care and reciprocity, and the frictions and fractures that arise out of interrogation and honest feedback. While this anthology does not look at a story about an experience between a researcher and the communities with which she is engaged (or engages), Richa’s work is an excellent example of this.
In her book Playing with Fire (2006), Richa shares seven Sangtin women’s “collective reflections” on common struggles. As an academic located in a different socio-political setting compared to these seven rural women, Richa’s work speaks to feminist epistemology and methodology, and how the “knowledge of resistance” can be co-produced. Yaari, similarly, is a documentation of this resistance, given the political identities that women and queer folx occupy (as mentioned earlier).
To me, therefore, Yaari is an important contribution to reimagining feminist literature and methods. It inspires us to practice our feminisms through solidarities of empathy and care – or friendship. Friendships, in turn, nudge us to challenge the power dynamics researcher-practitioners (like me) may implicitly impose through our questions or methods. I would keep going back to this anthology to reflect on my idea of generating value through my work. Lastly, and in a rather selfish pursuit, I also hope that the editors of Yaari raise a call for contributions for another iteration of this volume; and, this time, focusing on journeys of friendship and meaning-making explored on the field.
Tanya Rana is an early-career researcher on gender and governance.