When a topic becomes a part of you, could you really not be a part of it? 

This project is the culmination of years of thoughts, personal experiences, situated knowledges and imaginations; reflecting my past, present, and hopefully future trajectories and the ways they intertwine with trajectories of others, contestations, and radical imaginations. 

This short letter, is in a sense a positionality statement, a preface to the project and the ‘formal’ documents to follow, and an exercise of self-disclosure and transparency.  Through it, I firstly hope to make visible how my ‘self’ permeates every aspect of the study, from its conception to its implementation, and my dual insider-outsider perspective. More generally, it is an effort to showcase the importance of systematic reflections in action both on my work and on the frameworks I operate within, as part of each phase of the study, as well as what forms this might take, highlighting that the way knowledge is gathered, interpreted, and produced, is relevant to what its claims are.

Finally, this letter is a reminder to myself on why I am doing this research, throughout the rest of two-and-something years I have left; something to return back to.