- Introduction
- Formulating the question and identifying stakeholders
- Some thoughts about method
- The interview
- Preliminary findings and observations
- References
Introduction
The research question that forms the basis of this report is exploring how individual subjects who come from various geographic, political, religious, class, caste and other social positions in the South Asian region, and are likely to represent a unique overlap of these, are able to navigate the social space of a university in the UK. The common linchpin that is the basis to understand these subjects is the way they eat food. The project uses semi-structured interviews and sensory emplacement in order to achieve this, where the interview is perceived as a multisensory event (Pink, 2015) and is conducted while participants cook their food. The interviews are subjected to thematic analysis with inductive coding and highlighting of themes and sub-themes within them. The transcriptions also contain multisensorial detail of sounds and activity that occurred during the interview outside formal lines of questioning.
This report is based on three interviews conducted as part of a postgraduate course on Qualitative Social Research Methods at the London School of Economics, and outlines the thought process that went into the research design for this project, and while three interviews is not sufficient evidence to hypothesise anything of grander value, it presented me with a complex and rich amount of qualitative data that allowed me to consider preliminary findings and record them in this document. The relevance of this research is to notice how changing social contexts amid complex personal cultural histories allow for disjunctive experiences of student life in London. Centering the interview around food also potentially indicate research on material culture and consumption practices in this disjunctive context.
Formulating the question and identifying stakeholders
My approach to this research question came from a personal place. Food is a part of everyday life. Human (and non-human) lives revolve around food, and this is something I have always found intriguing. My own personal relationship with food involved experiencing food in a highly religious Hindu environment where vegetarian food was constructed in terms of purity. I then went on to unlearn those purist notions. And when I started working in the environment and animal rights sector, I turned vegan. In all of this, the South Asian diaspora is a cultural amalgam of very complex identities and hierarchies, very different from what I experienced in my interactions with people in the UK.
Right off the bat, I realised that the broader my research was, the less likely was I to arrive at something productive. In engaging with literature in urban theory (Harvey, 2012) and its intersection with cultural studies (Holston & Appadurai, 1996), I realised the city was a site where cultural contexts coalesce in a generally homogenised way. In this paradigm, through personal engagements in student activism, I realised that there are cultural differences that could arise even in terms of the social position of a person. While metrics like age, sex and gender played a role, I developed a hunch that a student and a working professional were likely to approach their lives very differently when it came to food, and were also therefore likely to care about things differently. So slowly, my research narrowed down to students (typically from a similar cultural place – like the South Asian region) living in a city on their own.
I initially wanted my project to have something to do with veganism and my personal disillusionment with the cognitive dissonance (Rothgerber, 2020) everyone around me seemed to exhibit, where personal engagement with animal rights might position someone as caring for all the right things (they might even have pets of their own) and seem a genuine and empathetic person, but they at the same time would disregard their own relationship with their own food – most predominantly meat, and when a conversation about factory farming would unsettle their eating practices, which seemed almost psychologically emplaced within their daily life, the inconvenience they would experience clouded their ability to hold a conversation about it.
But I realised that conducting interviews with a sample size of people specifically about veganism was likely to run into two problems. Firstly, I was at a risk of conflating my interviewee’s experiences with my own veganism, and that would create a kind of bias likely to defeat the purpose of collecting qualitative data from a subject. Secondly, it would be impractical to center an interview on veganism because if I were to interview a vegan person, I would likely find them agreeing with me, while a non-vegan would likely be made to feel uncomfortable in such a setting. I could not influence an interview in any particular way, I needed to have a research question that was open-ended enough to give my participants space to express their own lived experience.
Patton (2002), in discussing kinds of qualitative interviewing, talks of a “truly open-ended question” being necessary for valuable qualitative research. My question was not open-ended at all. It presumed some things to be right and worked within that. Evolving through this, I decided to abandon my own veganism for the moment and work with the idea that I could try and understand how people chose to eat their food, and what that could tell me about them. I realised through the course that qualitative interviewing cannot pre-suppose anything about its participants and I continue to find that valuable in a wonderful way.
I settled on London as the urban site where cultures would likely coalesce. I settled on the South Asian diaspora as a broad, yet specific cultural space. And I settled on students living on their own as my subjects.
As I worked on designing the methodology for this, I realised that by allowing myself to conduct an “informal conversation interview” (Patton, 2002; Wells, 2011) when my participants were cooking their food in their kitchens, I could emplace myself in the interview environment and therefore allow the project to assume an auto-ethnographic tone through a “reflexive dyadic interview” (Ellis et al., 2011). This allowed me to bring myself back into the research, while also letting me keep my distance and not conflate the experiences of the subject with my own lived experience.
Some thoughts about method
The existence of research is validated through what value it adds to the world. And with qualitative research, I have come to realise that it is not a pursuit of objectivity, but the doubling down on subjectivity itself as being the thing that gives it its value. To quote Donna Haraway, ‘…my problem, and “our” problem, is how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognising our own “semiotic technologies” for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a “real” world…’ (Haraway, 1988). In my approach to this project, it was some such accounts of the real world that I was trying to discover - but also that while there is no such thing as objectivity, there still has to be unbiased commitment to acknowledging subjectivities to create something more objective, although not necessarily truly objective.
For instance, coding an interview cannot cherry-pick things people said that the researcher agrees with – it has to be objective in its holistic attempt at understanding everything a person said. But does the research itself have to strive for objectivity when objectivity itself is impossible? I didn’t think so. And therefore, through my project, I have doubled down on the biases created by my own relationship with food by emplacing myself in the research, rather than to remove myself from the field, while providing as free and open-ended an environment as possible for the participant to speak. My positionality and situation, therefore, has added nuance.
For this project, my engagement with narrative ethics enormously influenced my process. Arthur Frank (2014) talks of how ‘People not only live their lives, but also imagine the lives they are living, and stories express those imaginations. We humans act on what we have imagined even as actions shape our imaginations.’ I was interested in these narratives and stories, and had also interacted with the author before coming across the 2014 paper. In The Wounded Storyteller (Arthur Frank, 1995), the author conducts epistemological research into understanding medical patients and the wounds they carry, but the interesting complication is that the author himself had just recovered from an illness before he started working on the book. It seemed auto-ethnographic in the way my research was shaping itself to be.
The third chapter of Kathleen Wells’ book on Narrative Enquiry (2011) directed me to more of this kind of work. It provided me with a framework for my research that allowed me to imagine data outside of the interview. I engaged with the transcription of my interviews in a more interpretive way. I wrote down notes before, during and after each interview. I will discuss these more in detail in the next section.
I complicated these sources with my readings of John Law (2004) and Sarah Pink (2015). Law freed my mind. Where I was otherwise finding a model of a project someone else had conducted and trying to do something similar, I realised that my project was unique to me, and while I could rely on other ethnographies and research projects instructionally, I had the freedom to improvise. I allowed myself the space to transcribe elements in my recordings I thought were personally important, as can be seen in both the interview transcripts. That research was an inherently “messy” endeavour, and that it was involved in producing the very knowledge it was trying to discover was instrumental in shaping this project.
Reading Sarah Pink, specifically the section of her book (2015) where she talks about ‘Intentionally joining others in (near) universal embodied activities),’ like eating food was also relevant to my method design. By talking to my participants about how they ate food while they cooked it and while they were present with me in their kitchen, I was including myself in a sensory experience that was unique. The experiences of sight, sound and taste were all data, not simply the words that were being exchanged.
I therefore realised through engaging with these sources, that I would choose to conduct a semi-structured and open-ended interview. I could create space for both formal and informal interaction and wherever I wanted, could include parts of the research I felt relevant through my own embodiment in these environments. Interviews became the most ideal way to conduct my research. I could not do participant observation because it seemed logistically complicated to just put myself in someone’s kitchen without any intention. I do not think I would have been allowed there, neither would I have felt personally comfortable. I did consider asking participants to record themselves cooking and conduct the interview later in a more controlled environment, but I eventually decided I wanted to put myself in the field and see how it went. And so it all came together in that format.
The interview: before, during and after
Karen O’Reilly’s book on Ethnographic Methods (2005) presents the formality of interviews on a spectrum of very informal in terms of chance encounters in an ethnographic study, and a more intentional formal interview where the researcher is in control. I believe my research would fall in the latter category, where although the interview being conducted in a kitchen has potential for informal conversation, it is still, most decidedly, an interview where questions are being asked within a particular structure. As I noticed after conducting my three interviews, the third interview had a lot more informal interaction because my participant was getting regularly distracted by something in her environment, while this wasn’t the case in my second interview. In my first interview, my participant seemed to be aware of when the voice recorder was running, and was likely to spiral into informal conversation between recordings.
Before
I have changed the names of my interview participants to Sanah, Nidhi and Falguni. This is the order in which I conducted their interviews. I contacted Sanah and Falguni by asking them to meet me in person, while I contacted Nidhi (who I had a prior friendship with) on WhatsApp. I had no choice but to tell them all that I was vegan because all of them asked me what I wanted to eat. While Sanah chose to cook something non-vegetarian despite that (intending to preserve authenticity), Nidhi insisted that when she cooked with friends (which she perceived me as, despite my intention to be an objective interviewer) she would cook to accommodate them (which she thought was authentic of her), which I think is inherently interesting because it represented two different approaches to authenticity, and both were arguably ethically sound - which fits directly into my focus on narrative ethics.
I was afraid my participants knowing I was vegan would affect the research, but I believe that was the point of my research where I include myself in the process somewhat. When I explained the project to Falguni, she ended up having a long conversation with me about her food choices, which I later committed to field notes and was aware of when I conducted her interview. In that informal meeting, she mentioned her relationship with food growing up, all of which came unprompted, and it rattled me a little because I didn’t know what parts of this was data, because this wasn’t the interview itself, it was simply me telling her about my research question, but what I later recorded as field notes, from this informal conversation, also allowed me to plan a direction for the interviews when I finally got around to doing them.
During
I conducted the interviews relying on a pre-prepared structure of questions I allowed myself to deviate from wherever required, by taking jottings of my own experiences, and being aware of my own sensory involvement, namely of the space and the informal interactions we would have outside of the interview itself. For instance I was caught off guard in the first interview because I did not expect the table to be far away from the cooking area, and had to move around a lot because I needed a place to keep my things. I was also very surprised by the kinds of discomfort I felt when Sanah was cooking chicken. The overwhelming experience also disoriented me and made me pause and stammer a lot during the interview. While both Sanah and Falguni did not have discomfort talking while cooking (they seemed at ease and comfortable), Nidhi was unable to do both at the same time, so a large part of the interview happened sitting down, and the cooking after. Finally, I have to mention that it felt convenient to conduct multiple short recordings rather than one long recording (this was suggested to me by Sanah in the first interview, another classic example of the interviewee influencing method, and I stuck to this throughout).
After
I approached the transcription process as an intentional, interpretive act (Riessmann, 2008). I recognised and included pauses and expressive sounds in brackets, interruptions with hyphens and I used double quotes whenever interviewees paraphrased something someone else said. I recognised overlapping conversation wherever I could, as well as tonal changes (Wells, 2011; Poland, 2002).
In my analysis, I identified broad, unchanging inductive themes and flexible sub-codes within those themes while I was transcribing, and I assigned a colour to each theme. I gave myself some flexibility in terms of the sub-codes depending on each interview. For example, under the theme “social and cultural position”, Falguni exhibited a “proclivity to ethical consumption” practices that Sanah explicitly did not, so I used that sub-code specifically for the former. Similarly, I used the sub-code “cultural integration” for Sanah, that I could not for Falguni. But the theme is the same in both cases.
An interesting theme I used was Informal conversation, where I highlight conversations that occur outside of the interview that indicate the external environment. In this regard, I also would like to highlight that my conversation with Sanah in particular saw a lot of informal conversation in between recordings, where she would speak to me much more naturally when the recorder was off for a minute or so between recordings, and part of one such conversation got recorded in one of my recordings.
Very interestingly, in all three interviews, I found that the most exciting responses came at the end of the interview when I asked the participants if they wanted to add anything I had not asked. I found it disconcerting to ask questions about caste, or religion beyond a preliminary point, and was surprised to find Sanah bring it up herself. Similarly with Falguni, who spoke about wanting to be vegan herself.
Preliminary findings and observations
Since this is based on only three interviews, nothing I say in this part of the report is a generalised truth. Rather, I am mapping tensions, and highlighting dynamics that deserve more thought in policy. Preliminary analysis has offered insight into how food practices intersect with identity, politics and adaptation among South Asian students navigating life in London. One emerging theme is the role of social and familial relationships in shaping food-related decisions. Participants often described tensions with peers or family - particularly around political or religious beliefs, which influenced how they engage with food and others. In some cases, these tensions led to a form of quiet resistance, while in others, they contributed to a sense of disconnection or fatigue.
Another significant pattern is the varying degrees of adaptability participants showed in response to their new food environments. For example, while Falguni approaches food with strong political consciousness, also compounded by the field notes I recorded, she expresses deep discomfort with the compromises she’s had to make in London. In contrast, Sanah, who appears less politically invested in her food choices, reports a smoother adjustment and even a sense of liberation in her new routines.
Another interesting observation from Sanah’s interview is how it acts as an exception to the rule in terms of how regional, class and urban identities shape perceptions of dietary norms. Having grown up in an elite household in Kerala, although not exactly urban, she expresses genuine surprise at the prevalence of vegetarianism among her Indian peers outside of her hometown, and abroad. In the interview, she notes: “…That people don’t eat non-veg as much in India. So when we traveled around Europe with my family a little bit, we were taken for vegetarians a lot and I was actually very confused. I’m like ‘Huh? Okay, is it that common to be a vegetarian in India?’” This moment of bewilderment reveals the limitations of her prior understanding of Indian dietary practices, shaped by her own regional and caste-based experience.
Kerala occupies a unique position in India’s culinary and political landscape. While many Indian states, particularly in the north, have caste-linked taboos around meat, Kerala’s food culture is more diverse, with meat consumption cutting across caste and religion in many communities. As someone deeply embedded in this context, Sanah did not anticipate that vegetarianism - often seen in India as a marker of caste privilege and Brahminical purity - would be so dominant among her South Asian peers in London, or in Bangalore, where she worked for a few years prior to moving to London. While her assumption that most of India is vegetarian is false (Biswas, 2018), it seems true if one’s experience of the country is restricted to its urban spaces, which are largely made up of upper caste, privileged Indians.
This misrecognition, while brief, is telling. It underscores how urban elite positionality in India (or in Sanah’s case, even non-urban spaces if you’re from Kerala) can foster a perception of culture that is contextually grounded but not universally applicable. Sanah’s politically engaged worldview, informed by her upbringing in Kerala, did not extend to a broader understanding of the cultural politics of food in other parts of India. In fact, her encounter with diasporic vegetarianism abroad reveals how Indian identity itself fragments when displaced - how assumptions carried from home are unsettled by the plurality of other Indian regions, or other international regions with Indian population.
These insights suggest that food practices among international students cannot be reduced to a single diasporic experience. Instead, they are shaped by local histories, caste structures and regional ideologies, which travel unevenly and often encounter friction in transnational contexts. If I were to return to this project in the future, I might explore these negotiations with more depth, particularly how ideological dissonance within diasporic spaces influence daily habits, consumption ethics and broader relationships to cultural identity.
References
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