Nikita Aggarwal, PhD Candidate, to Present at 2026 University of Bath Qualitative Research Symposium.
Nikita Aggarwal, PhD candidate in Social Work, has been accepted to present at the 2026 Qualitative Research Symposium, hosted by the University of Bath’s School of Management. Her talk, “From Access to Credibility: Navigating Trust and Visibility in Ethnographic Fieldwork with Immigrant Food-Service Workers in the U.S.,” will be delivered in January 2026 and draws on the community-focused and ethnographic component of her mixed-method dissertation research.
The presentation will highlight how trust, access, and research boundaries are negotiated through sustained presence in restaurant corridors, participation in worker-organization spaces, culturally responsive engagement, and reflexive adaptation to workers’ daily lives, safety concerns, and structural vulnerabilities. More broadly, the talk aims to contribute methodological insights for community-engaged research by exploring how ethnographic rigor, ethical accountability, and participatory relationships are continuously shaped across stages of fieldwork and data collection in studies with marginalized and hard-to-reach populations in contexts marked by precarity, surveillance, and uncertainty.