‘Understanding Ethics in Ethnographic Practice’ on 28 February 2022 was the first session of the ‘Community Leadership Program’ that B-CAF is embarking on. The speaker, Dr. Urmimala Sarkar Munsi, a renowned scholar, visual anthropologist, dancer-choreographer and Associate Professor at the School of Arts and Aesthetics of Jawaharlal Nehru University laid down the possibilities of creating processes that are available for a researcher to work with – while working with(in) a community.

The word “Ethnography” denotes the idea of learning and writing about the community. The ethnography practice derived in the colonial period largely from the urge of knowing about the lesser- known communities and has been criticised for it’s colonial biases. The process of writing about the community also tends to get influenced by the pre-conceived knowledge and notions of the researcher. Ethnography as a process depends knowledge gathered from the observations by living in/ with the community. But, can anyone live somebody else’s life? Or, is the researcher only pretending to become a part of the community? The process requires an understanding of the limitations that come with the different spaces the researchers and the communities they work with inhabit. The researchers need to be conscious about their subjectivity and become a ‘vulnerable observer’ to begin a journey of co-learning and co-experiencing in the community space.

As there is often a pre-set hierarchy assumed by the researcher in such programs, Dr. Sarkar Munsi’s discussion centred around the idea of “learning to unlearn” as a basic tool of such community-based work. In the talk, Dr. Sarkar Munsi asked, what is the way to be ethical in the process of knowing? How do we place ourselves? She suggested that the process has to generate a form of co-creation and sharing of knowledge generated from discussions with the community – by bringing together skills and building on the need of the community. The generated knowledge belongs to both the community and researcher and the consent of making and sharing the knowledge has to come from both. She again questions, how does consent work in a position of power? The researcher, who has the ability to write, appears with a camera and a microphone – automatically sets forth a hierarchy in the space. That also tends to create a hierarchy of knowledge. As a result, one has to constantly create spaces for dialogue and sharing while planning any program or activity with the community.

As the community consistently adjusts to its embodied and experiential lived realities, it is necessary to revisit the space over and over again to understand the changes and nuances. Dr. Sarkar Munsi mentions how repeated exposure to the everyday life/space of the community is necessary to understand the needs and views of any human group. Imposition of pre-planned ideas is often the norm that one needs to consciously avoid. Hence, it is necessary to create a clear boundary of ethics through a self-reflexive process in the ethnographic work, while working for/with, writing and learning about people.