Negotiating Shuttling Between Transnational Experiences

Abstract

Using several approaches of data collection over a period of 10 months, the author combines participant observations, conversational interviews, photoelicitations, and various other serendipitous types of information gathering in performative spaces of actions and re-actions, demonstrating the contestatory negotiations of two transnational female Indian graduate students who had been in the United States for no longer than a year. Methodologically, the author explores the role of performance ethnography informed by de/colonizing epistemologies to highlight the possibilities of working within/against/through contestatory discourses. Demonstrating the complexities of human experiences through front- and back-staged one-act plays, the author argues for opening up possibilities of scientific research that investigates the role of social structures of inequality in producing experiences of marginalization.