Interviewing Against the Odds

Kumar demonstrates that the increasing abundance of digital data to fuel empirical research is equipped to tell us much more about the West than about the rest of the world, particularly the global South, which still lacks representation in our increasingly digital media landscape. The chapter discusses some of the challenges that arise when researchers set out to collect data from communities that are under-served, under-resourced, and under-represented. Based on her own ethnographic experiences Kumar shows how the hurdles encountered by researchers in these contexts are not merely logistical or physical. The greater challenge becomes discerning the questions to ask that are relevant and understanding how the hidden or less obvious socially constructed lenses such as gender, class, caste, among others influence the data that is to be collected.