ABSTRACT
In this article, I reflect on the ‘creative turn’ to my research as I encountered methodological failures in doing field research in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. My research was focused around the lives and labor of young migrant women who had come to work in an electronics factory inside a Special Economic Zone located outside the city of Chennai. While I was committed to a collaborative approach to enable women to tell their stories with ‘an intimacy, complexity and force’, I inadvertently produced ‘space(s) of failure’ during fieldwork that did not necessarily create meaningful collaborations. However, things changed significantly as a possibility emerged to create something together in the form of public radio podcasts. It opened up the space for conversations and motivated the women to come up with their own ideas and themes for discussions. The possibility of being heard in their own voice played an important role in producing such collaboration. The podcasts were acts of speech through which they put into circulation their viewpoints about the society and their place within it. I reflect here on the ‘productive failures’ during fieldwork that led to the possibility of new forms of creative collaboration that was generative of wonderful insights.
