Best practices for conducting fieldwork with marginalized communities

摘要

Fieldwork is indispensable for understanding, explaining, and predicting the role of information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D) of marginalized communities. Engaging with marginalized communities is at the heart of ICT4D fieldwork. However, vulnerabilities of marginalized communities can prevent them from participating in fieldwork. The goal of this paper is to report best practices for engaging with marginalized communities. The findings are grounded in our fieldwork that consisted of ten three-hour sessions, each including focus groups, surveys, and hands-on exercises, with 152 participants earning less than USD 2 a day, in their native language at ten rural and urban public libraries in India. We conclude that a combination of proactive planning around the vulnerabilities of marginalized communities, constant reflective monitoring of the vulnerabilities and resulting challenges during fieldwork, and appropriate responsive action to address the challenges is one of the best ways of conducting fieldwork, since it helped us manage a majority of the challenges resulting from geographic, temporal, technological, financial, educational, psychological, informational, infrastructural, social, and cultural vulnerabilities of the participants. Our organic and structured guidance in the form of lessons learned can help library and information science researchers and practitioners to customize fieldwork around the vulnerabilities of marginalized communities.