About the Project

The Locavore works towards a more equitable and sustainable food system in India. Through storytelling, research, community initiatives, and grassroots partnerships, we use food as a lens to explore livelihoods, culture, ecology, and climate.

Cooked Cities is a research and multimedia project led by The Locavore in partnership with H T Parekh Foundation through its flagship programme, ReVIVE. It studies how urban heat is reshaping the lives and labour of the people who keep India’s urban centres fed. In Mumbai and Delhi-NCR, we’ll work with food market vendors, food delivery workers, and restaurant kitchen workers to understand how they experience heat, what it means for their working conditions and livelihoods, how they adapt, and what changes they believe would make a difference.

The project has three strands. Heat at Work is the main focus and looks at how workers experience heat during the working day. Heat in the System looks at how markets, delivery networks and restaurant kitchens operate, where heat puts these systems under strain, and how access to water, shade, rest and ventilation shapes working conditions. Heat at Home follows selected experiences beyond the workplace to understand how workers and households adapt their cooking, shopping, rest and everyday routines. The research will inform editorial stories, visual documentation, public conversations, and an Evidence and Learning Brief.

About the Role

The Project Research Lead will guide the project’s research from design and piloting through fieldwork, analysis and handover. They will develop the research approach, train and support field investigators, oversee the quality of the evidence, and work with The Locavore’s editorial team to communicate the findings clearly and accurately.

The proposed study will use purposive recruitment to gather approximately 80–100 completed worker surveys per city, alongside repeat qualitative engagement with approximately 15–20 workers per city. Some workers may take part in both. Where timing allows, the team will speak with selected workers before and during the main heat period. Site observations and selected conversations with people familiar with these workplaces and communities will add context. The findings will be exploratory and will speak to the workers and settings studied.

The Project Research Lead will set the research protocols, train the field team, and oversee the quality of the work. The Project Lead will coordinate field staffing, partner access, scheduling, logistics, and the budget. The Project Editor will lead editorial planning and publication, with input from the Project Research Lead on how the evidence is represented.

The proposed field team includes five short-term field investigators and one writer-researcher fellow assignment in each city. The Project Research Lead will travel for training, field visits, and monitoring at key stages of the project. More details about the workplan and field arrangements will be shared with shortlisted candidates.

Key Responsibilities

Research Design and Planning

• Develop and lead the research strategy, plan and timeline, from the review of existing work through to the final brief and handover.
• Review relevant literature and existing data to refine the research questions, decide what information to collect and identify gaps the project can address.
• Define the sampling and recruitment approach, including participant eligibility and the intended balance across worker groups and sites. Develop the worker survey, interview guides, and site observation tools.
• Lead the piloting and refinement of the research tools. Check whether questions and translations are clear, how long participation takes, and whether any part of the process makes it difficult for workers to respond comfortably.
• Keep the Project Lead informed of progress against research milestones and flag any changes needed to the fieldwork plan, timeline, or budget.
• Work with the Project Lead to plan the field surveys, estimate research costs, and identify staffing and training needs.

Fieldwork and Team Training

• Help select field investigators, develop training materials, and train the field team to use the survey and interview tools.
• Guide research fellows and field investigators on recruitment, site visits, and repeat interviews. Take part in selected interviews where useful.
• Visit field sites for training and monitoring. Review incoming survey responses and interview notes, check coverage across worker groups and sites, and address gaps or data quality issues while fieldwork is underway.
• Set up, test and deploy the digital survey, and make sure field investigators are using the current version.
• Work with the Project Lead and local teams to plan fieldwork around workers’ availability and heat conditions, including assessing when to pause, reschedule, or stop fieldwork.

Research Ethics and Data Management

• Develop and oversee procedures for voluntary, informed consent, participant privacy, repeat contact, and secure data handling.
• Ensure participants can understand what the research involves and how their contributions may be used. Keep consent for research separate from permission to record, photograph, identify, or publish someone’s story.
• Arrange opportunities for workers to speak privately where needed, particularly when introductions come through employers, platforms, or other intermediaries.
• Maintain research records and manage access to datasets, recordings, and contact information in line with the agreed protocols.

Analysis, Research Outputs, and Learning

• Clean and analyse quantitative and qualitative data. Bring together survey responses, repeat interviews, site observations, and existing research to identify recurring experiences, differences, and gaps.
• Discuss emerging findings with relevant researchers, field partners and, where appropriate, participating workers. Document how the findings were reached and what the evidence can support.
• Develop the methodology, findings, and limitations for the Evidence and Learning Brief, working with the Project Editor on the final text. Prepare tables, charts, or presentations where they help explain the work.
• Review research claims in stories, summaries, and visual materials. Assist the editorial team in distinguishing individual experiences from patterns in the data and communicate the limits of the study.
• Contribute research inputs to selected workshops, roundtables, and discussions. At the end of the engagement, hand over the cleaned data, tools, and analysis notes under the project’s agreed protocols.
• Place the findings in the context of existing work on urban heat, labour, and food systems, and identify priorities for further attention.

Candidate Attributes

We are looking for someone who is:

• Curious about food work, livelihoods and urban heat: You are interested in how workers experience heat and how the conditions around them shape the choices they can make.
• Comfortable working across communities and institutions: You are able to work respectfully with workers, field investigators, local organisations, researchers, and editors.
• Organised and adaptable: Able to guide research across two cities, spot problems early, and adjust plans as field conditions change.
• A thoughtful communicator: Able to train field teams, navigate sensitive conversations, and explain findings and their limitations in plain language.
• Grounded in ethical research practice: Attentive to workers’ time, consent and privacy, and to the implications of sharing their experiences publicly.

Experience and Skills

• At least 3 years of relevant experience in applied research, with demonstrated responsibility for leading a field study from design and piloting through to analysis and reporting.
• Experience designing surveys and interview guides, training or supervising field teams, and analysing both quantitative and qualitative data.
• Ability to build, test and troubleshoot digital surveys using ODK, KoboToolbox, SurveyCTO or a comparable tool.
• Strong spreadsheet and data analysis skills, with the ability to document how data was cleaned, analysed, and interpreted. Experience presenting findings through clear charts or visualisations is welcome.
• Strong writing and communication skills, and experience working with people across disciplines.
• Experience in labour research, public health, urban studies, climate, food systems, or a related field would be useful.
• Working proficiency in Hindi and/or Marathi is desirable. The role involves overseeing translated tools and field interviews, with support from local team members where needed.