On 19 June, project Co-Investigators Dr Joanne Entwistle and Dr Don Slater attended the British Academy workshop meeting. This was an opportunity to report back on the progress of our fieldwork to date in Delhi and Trivandrum as well as to hear about the progress of the other grant holders.

To this end, the morning and early afternoon was spent on progress updates, sharing preliminary findings and discussing some of the challenges of fieldwork abroad. Many of these challenges are logistical – acquiring visas, transferring money between partner institutions, for example – while others were methodological and intellectual.

One issue that kept recurring was how to incorporate gender into fieldwork. Since our project is the only one explicitly focused on gender and infrastructure, we lead the way in much of this discussion. In break-out groups in the afternoon, gender was highlighted as one key concern; a focused discussion was dedicated…