Indigenous Paradigm Matters: Reflections on the Doctoral Research Seminar

On 28 June 2025, the Department of Sociology, CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Bengaluru, hostedan engaging session of its Doctoral Research Seminar Series, featuring Ms. Ringngheti Khenglawt,  a Research Scholar in Sociology at Christ (Deemed to be University), Bangalore. Her academic interests span soap opera studies, ideology, gender, tribal studies, and popular culture, with a particular focus on the Mizo community. She has published several works examining the intersections of culture, identity, and media.

Her work reflects a commitment to understanding and representing indigenous perspectives, and she continues to contribute to the field through her research on indigenous methodologies, such as employing Titi as a method in Mizo studies. Her presentation, “Indigenous Paradigm Matters: Claiming Titi as a Method in Mizo Research”, offered profound insights into the epistemological and methodological significance of indigenous approaches in social research.

The seminar foregrounded Titi—a Mizo mode of conversation, humor, and the act of doing—as an indigenous methodological tool. Far from being trivial or informal, Titi emerged as a powerful entry point into Mizo knowledge systems, illuminating how oral traditions, humor, and relational accountability shape ways of knowing. In positioning Titi as method, Khenglawt challenged dominant Western paradigms of detached objectivity, underscoring the ethical imperative of research that is accountable to the community it represents.

What stood out was her emphasis on researcher positionality. As an insider to the Mizo community, she illustrated how her identity, relationships, and cultural embeddedness enabled interviews that unfolded in natural storytelling forms. This reflexive stance blurred the rigid lines between “researcher” and “researched,” urging us to rethink knowledge production not as extraction but as a relational, reciprocal practice.

Two key cases reinforced this paradigm:

• Tlawmngaihna (respect, reciprocity, and responsibility) as the moral fabric of Mizo life, highlighting indigenous ethics in fieldwork.

• Titi and humor as central to social life and research practice, showing how playful engagement carries serious cultural meaning.

The session also opened space for broader decolonial reflections. Indigeneity, as articulated by Ms. Khenglawt, is not merely an identity marker but a liberating epistemic force—rooted in struggle, community, and relational knowledge. It is at once resistant to colonial epistemologies and generative of new modes of inquiry that move beyond decolonisation toward emancipation.

For participants, especially those researching outside their own cultural contexts, the session was deeply humbling. It raised critical questions of responsibility, reflexivity, and giving back. The speaker’s reminder—“You as a researcher represent Mizo outside the land—know it and let it be known”—echoed as both an ethical call and a methodological anchor.

The Department of Sociology at CHRIST (Deemed to be University) is focused on curating such intellectually vibrant spaces where postgraduate students can engage with grounded, context-specific methodologies. The seminar not only demystified indigenous research approaches but also made the research process more approachable, relevant, and ethically sensitive.

As we left the hall, what lingered was not just an academic takeaway, but a reminder: research is not neutral—it is always situated. And in that situatedness lies both our responsibility and our opportunity to practice sociology with sensitivity, humility, and criticality.