Unheard Voices is a storytelling platform focused on highlighting the stories of the migrant women workers in Mumbai, India that were affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Their experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic in Mumbai, one of the hotspots of the virus speaks about the systemic challenges that they faced in accessing opportunities. It highlights the socio-economic and cultural barriers that women, especially migrant women workers face in India’s “commercial capital”. This is a repository of their aspirations in life in order to mobilize necessary support from the community and with grassroots partnerships. It incorporates the qualitative stories of migrant women that are brought together in the form of a scrolling map containing interview recordings, physical artifacts, and demographic visuals.
The community of fieldwork for this project is located in Reay Road, Mumbai— an erstwhile spot for Mumbai’s mills and factories. Today, it’s mainly known for the century-old station on the Mumbai Suburban Rail network (famously known as Mumbai’s local trains). The Mumbai Port Trust hosts their godowns here but a community has settled here over the past three decades.
Unheard Voices is an attempt to develop a new and innovative method to tell stories. The overall methodology was created for effective storytelling, incorporating innovative research ethnography, and complying with ethical standards to facilitate the fieldwork. It consists of the following components—
Highlighting the fieldwork data through storytelling: Personalized stories unveil opportunities for development and improvement. Stories have the power to inform decision-makers to move in a way that statistics and reports alone often cannot. They bring out information that is emotionally compelling. My approach is focused on crafting a personalized narrative by talking to the women in the Reay Road community to understand their viewpoints about their working conditions, aspirations, and extreme needs in daily life. The stories were recorded with their verbal and written consent.
Cultural Probe Kits to facilitate the fieldwork: This is an approach adopted from design research applying the methods described in the crowd-sourced document Doing Fieldwork In A Pandemic by Deborah Lupton. The cultural Probe involves developing kits of materials that are at the end left with research participants to complete in their own time. Once the activities using the kit are completed, they are sent back to the researchers. In this case, the kit comprises essential items such as sanitary napkins, ration kits, masks, sanitizer, disposable cameras, drawing sheets, and coloring pens for their children. The kit serves as a way of co-creating and getting personalized artifacts directly from the women and their children. They are the authors and photographers of their own reality.
