Exploring new methodological approaches to mapping informal mobilities

This paper highlights mobility as a methods paradigm through a study focused on socio-spatial mobilities of urban marginalised women (UMW) residing in the peripheral areas of New Delhi, India. It does so by investigating daily survival mobilities of urban poor women who are at social and spatial peripheries of the society and the city. Exploring this dimension of mobility through the lens of gender and urban informality opens up unexplored arenas for new research techniques. The existing research methods do not do justice to the studies relating to the aspects of everyday mobility (Law and Urry, 2004). To understand the complexities of social, economic and political relations it is critical to not only investigate the movement of people, objects, information and ideas but also how they get mobilised when they interact with others (Garfinkel, 1976; Wittgenstein, 2009).

This paper discusses mobile methodology including digital ethnography, travel diaries and informal conversations adopted in the study to understand the intertwining elements embedded within the daily mobilities of UMW. It is understood that within the broader spectrum of society, relationships and networks emerge while people are on the move. There is a difference in the kinds of interactions that happen when a person is in motion than when stationary. Being mobile presents different sets of knowledge and identities to people who experience it (Hein et al., 2008). Moreover, Weisner (1966) argues that research questions that engender the complexity pertaining to multi-disciplinary research areas (in this case mobility studies, urban informality, gender studies) cannot be dealt with one single method. This research uses a combination of new technologies along with mobile methods like ethnography to reveal the inter-relationship between social and spatial mobility of UMW. The research analyses the social structures or networks formed while performing the act of travel as a part of the daily routine of the UMW. It involves the study of everyday life or daily mobilities of these women in diverse social contexts (considering Delhi as a city constituting many smaller cities and with different socio-cultural environments). Moreover, the issues pertaining to scale and ethics, geographical boundaries and social imagination, class and gender, and interdisciplinarity are also revealed through mobile methodologies.