phd

PhD Dissertation Project:
Language and Social Service Access in Kangra, India

Project Timeframe: 2017-2019
Role: Lead Researcher
Methods: Contextual Inquiry, Participant Observation, Qualitative Interviews, Audiovisual Ethnography, Media Analysis, Focus Groups, Qualitative Discourse Analysis, Photography
Companies: UCLA + collaboration with five governmental and non-governmental agencies in India
Project Stakeholders: Fulbright Program, Social Science Research Council, Wenner-Gren Foundation, UCLA Department of Anthropology

Problem

India is one of the world’s most densely multilingual countries, and the Himalayas contain some of the most densely multilingual societies in India. Such linguistic diversity impacts the everyday implementation of poverty alleviation programs. State and non-state development agencies and non-governmental organizations often employ agents who are from relatively affluent, upper-caste backgrounds, and who speak prestigious varieties of Hindi and English. Rural villagers, especially women, speak a variety of different languages, which are often associated with less education and exposure to bureaucratic procedures. Such communicative differences often pose challenges for rural women in accessing state services.

Question

How does linguistic diversity shape administration and access to social services amongst rural women in Himachal Pradesh, India?

Methods

For my PhD dissertation, I conducted five individual studies over twenty-one months of ethnographic fieldwork with state bureaucrats, NGO workers, elected officials, activists, and rural citizens in Kangra, India, to understand how they use their multilingual repertoires to administer and access state services. I used participant observation, audiovisual ethnography, interviewing, focus groups, news and social media analysis, and photography, in collaboration with five state and non-state agencies, to generate a holistic understanding of the role of language in social service provisioning.

I performed qualitative data analysis using discourse analysis of everyday interactions, emergent coding, participant composites, and data visualization using NVivo 12. I transcribed, coded, and analyzed over 10 hours of audiovisual data using ELAN.

Findings

My research showed that language alone was an insufficient predictor of how and why women are able to access state services (or not.) Instead, it was culturally-specific uses of different languages that determined whether beneficiaries gained access to services in the ways they desired.

This result challenged my initial hypothesis that language access - being unable to understand one another - was the root cause of barriers to access for rural women in service encounters. Instead, I found that all participants used a variety of languages, but that how they used those languages was the greatest predictor of whether or not they would gain access ot services in ways they desired.

I identified several linguistic strategies, including the use of specific registers, grammatical resources, and metapragmatic (i.e. talk about language itself) features that allowed service providers to determine the meanings of poverty, prosperity, and deservingness in everyday interactions.

Such processes of meaning-making directly impacted who could and could not access state services.

Impact

The findings of my research were shared with multiple state agencies who used the data to initiate discussion about new procedures for benefit selection, professional conduct for state agents, and the exclusionary nature of existing practices. These efforts to promote reform, led by activists on the ground, have changed the conversation around equity in rural development.

Deliverables

I have communicated my findings through 1 peer-reviewed journal article, 1 international research prize, 1 book chapter, and 13 national and international conference presentations.