Voices From the Margins is a digital humanities project designed to make visible what too often remains hidden: the reproductive struggles and care journeys of Muslim women in West Bengal, India. Rooted in ethnographic fieldwork but built through digital methods, this archive will bring together narrative, multimedia documentation, and spatial data to show how infertility is not merely a private or clinical concern but a deeply structural experience shaped by geography, infrastructure, and social inequality.
While infertility is often discussed in clinical terms, Voices From the Margins will center the embodied experiences of women who navigate complex landscapes of care. In contexts where womanhood is socially defined through motherhood, childlessness carries profound social consequences. These consequences are compounded for women living in underserved communities, where multiple forms of marginalization shape access to reproductive care and wellbeing. It is these structural barriers that the project seeks to document and make visible through digital tools.
At its core, this project will use digital technology not as an end in itself but as a tool to reveal relationships that traditional scholarship often overlooks. One of the central components of the project will be an interactive map that traces patient journeys from rural villages to Kolkata’s fertility hub. Built with Leaflet JS, the map will visualize travel distances, infrastructure gaps, and the uneven distribution of healthcare facilities. Alongside this mapping interface, the archive will preserve pluralistic care pathways. These include homeopathy and Ayurveda as well as religious consultation and community-based remedies. These practices are rapidly shifting under the pressures of biomedical expansion. Documenting them will offer a way to honor knowledge systems that often remain invisible in formal health discourse.
Beyond presenting my own fieldwork, a contributor submission system will invite community members, scholars, and practitioners to share stories, poems, photographs, and reflections. This invitation will especially reach out to those from the Global South. This will ensure that the archive continues to grow beyond my own fieldwork and evolves as a living, community-centered space.To make these materials accessible beyond academic circles, the archive will organize this material through thematic collections, short essays, and multimedia galleries. These will be accessible to scholars, educators, students, practitioners, and community advocates. Hosted on GitHub Pages, the site will benefit from long-term accessibility and integrated version control. The design will rely on Bootstrap to create a responsive and visually engaging layout. This will allow visitors to move intuitively between images, media sliders, fieldnote excerpts, and spatial visualizations.
The visual structure of the archive has been planned through wireframes that guide each page’s layout. The design will create distinct spaces for different types of engagement. These include an introductory homepage, pages dedicated to narrative and visual materials, an interactive mapping interface, and a section inviting community contributions. These design decisions will prioritize accessibility, clarity, and thoughtful engagement with sensitive materials.
To realize this vision, the project will unfold over a four-month timeline. I will establish the site infrastructure in January, develop thematic sections and integrate multimedia in February, build and refine the GIS mapping interface in March, and improve navigation, accessibility, and performance in April. Ultimately, Voices From the Margins is important because it will create a digital space for stories rarely centered in conversations about reproductive health. By combining narrative, multimedia, and mapping, the archive will not only document experiences but also reframe them. It will highlight how reproductive life is shaped by the uneven geographies of care, the weight of structural discrimination, and the everyday strategies women use to navigate these realities. In making these experiences accessible and visible, the project aims to spark more inclusive, community-rooted approaches to understanding reproductive justice in India.
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