One of the two 'founders' of Peace-ing It Together on Facebook, Nayanika Mahtani, has been a friend of mine for over 25 years. I had the opportunity to speak with her at length about Peace-ing It Together well before I decided to make it my site of study for this project. She in turn introduced me to her co-founder, Nadia, and I spoke with her too. Based on these two discussions, I was inducted as a member of this private group.
Participant observation
I became a member of Peace-ing It Together on Facebook in mid-March. I introduced myself and the purpose of my research shortly thereafter through the adjoining message. I received an enthusiastic response from many members who either posted on Facebook or messaged me 1:1 on Messenger expressing an offer to speak with me and contribute to my research. Thereafter, I made it a point to access this group at least 8-10 times in a week. I would observe and make note of the kind of messages posted, the nature of comments and responses. I also ensured that I would post messages and comment on posts made by others so that through my own interaction and active participation, I was able to get a better feel of the pulse of the group. I studied all messages posted in the four weeks prior to my joining this group. About 2 weeks after I joined, I began zeroing in on possible 'themes' or 'topics' on which messages were posted. As I began observing these more regularly, I got a sense of who were the more active participants, what was the nature of activity on this forum, what kinds of responses did the posts receive (likes or comments or both etc). I was particularly conscious of the fact that India and Pakistan did not share cordial relations at a country level and that of course manifested itself in the reaction of behaviour of its citizens - I tried to get a sense of the 'tone' and 'mood' of this group.
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In a few weeks, I was able to identify the broad themes that emanated from the interaction on the forum. In my mind, I wanted to have some idea of the broad themes before I engaged in semi-structured interviews and discussions with my identified informants.
Semi-structured interviews
I had received a very favourable response from many members of Peace-ing It Together who had wanted to participate in the research and provide their views. I finally selected four informants
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- Nayanika who is of Indian origin and lives in London
- Nadia who is of Pakistani origin and lives in Cambridge
- Aparna, who is an Indian based in Bangalore, India
- Rumana, who is from Pakistan and lives in Karachi
It was a conscious decision to select two from India and two from Pakistan. Further, by having two of them based in India and Pakistan and the other two based overseas, I wanted to see if I might get some differences in perspective.
The semi-structured discussion with each of them was preceded by WhatsApp exchanges wherein I had laid out a broad outline of the proposed discussion - giving them some idea of what we would discuss but at the same leaving enough room for flexibility and the ability to be not constrained by a format