Provincialising Patriarchy: Methodological Interventions in Geography

ABSTRACT Provincialising has become a commonly used tactic in Geography to overcome the discipline's attachment to global North's modernity. Provincialising means decolonising knowledge by showing the limits of European categorisations, highlighting instead, temporal and place‐based differences in categories, assumptions and paradigms. It has therefore garnered considerable attention from geographers. Crucially, provincialising not only involves viewing the margins differently from the centre, but also examining the ‘centre’ from the viewpoint of those who are beyond the centre. This reversal of the gaze is a critical method. However, provincialising has largely remained an analytical tactic, rather than an empirical one. This paper advances a methodology for provincialising in Geography, by examining patriarchy in the United Kingdom through the experiences of Indian migrant women in the United Kingdom who are working in the IT sector. It does so through three key moves. We operationalise provincialising by shifting whose perspective we centre, reorienting from where we analyse and refocusing what we examine—specifically how production and social reproduction are entangled. First, we make the familiar strange by examining how Indian migrant women experience patriarchy in global North workplaces. Rather than treating patriarchy as a problem of the global South, we reveal its operation within UK institutions. Second, we analyse how patriarchal relations embedded in both the UK IT labour market (production) and the welfare state (social reproduction) together impact Indian migrant women's ability to manage caregiving roles alongside work. Third, and cross‐cutting this analysis, we complicate patriarchy by exploring its entanglement with racialisation. The paper concludes by pointing out why such spatio‐temporal moves are necessary for geographical research and what new questions provincialising offers Geography.