Grey Moments in Carceral Fieldwork: Reflexivity, Emotional Labour, and Ethical Uncertainty among Families of Inmates of District Jail Doda, Jammu and Kashmir

Faizan Ashraf; Umair Khan

doi:10.36948/ijfmr.2026.v08i04.86131

Grey Moments in Carceral Fieldwork: Reflexivity, Emotional Labour, and Ethical Uncertainty among Families of Inmates of District Jail Doda, Jammu and Kashmir

Author(s)	Mr. Faizan Ashraf, Mr. Umair Khan
Country	India
Abstract	Fieldwork with the families of imprisoned men is rarely just a matter of asking questions and recording answers. It can pull a researcher into situations where what the methodology demands, what ethics requires, and what a person simply owes another human being in distress are not easy to tell apart. This article reflects on such situations, drawn from qualitative fieldwork with families of inmates of District Jail Doda, Jammu and Kashmir. The wider study looked at the social, economic, emotional, and educational fallout of imprisonment for families left behind; in the course of that work, however, a number of encounters raised harder questions about the researcher's role, emotional involvement, and ethical responsibility. Drawing on interviews, observations, informal conversations, and field notes gathered from 80 families, the article develops the idea of ‘grey moments’: situations in which emotional intensity, ethical uncertainty, relational expectation, and methodological duty all press in on the researcher at once. Three such moments are examined here: sitting with a mother's grief during an interview, learning through adult relatives how children conceal a parent's imprisonment from their peers, and being asked for legal or financial help the researcher was not in a position to give. Drawing together reflexivity, emotional labour, stigma, and ethics-in-practice, the article argues that grey moments are not simply interruptions to be managed and moved past. Looked at reflexively, they turn out to carry real methodological weight, telling us something about the conditions under which sociological knowledge of this kind gets made. The article's contribution to methodological debates on research with vulnerable populations lies in this insistence on situated ethical judgement, emotional awareness, researcher positionality, and reflexive practice as working parts of carceral fieldwork, not distractions from it.
Keywords	grey moments; carceral fieldwork; families of inmates; reflexivity; emotional labour; ethical uncertainty; stigma; Jammu and Kashmir
Field	Sociology > Administration / Law / Management
Published In	Volume 8, Issue 4, July-August 2026
Published On	2026-08-20
DOI	https://doi.org/10.36948/ijfmr.2026.v08i04.86131

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Grey Moments in Carceral Fieldwork: Reflexivity, Emotional Labour, and Ethical Uncertainty among Families of Inmates of District Jail Doda, Jammu and Kashmir

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