“The field is never only in one particular place.”
Kristin Eggeling
19 July 2021
Published: 05 February 2022
Image by Kristin Anabel Eggeling.
For Kristin Eggeling, patchwork came to characterize her methods because of the way it characterized her research object, diplomacy. She studies the nonlinear “patches of practice” that constitute multilateral diplomacy, thinking with Anna Tsing’s notion of ethnographic patches. Diplomacy, she found, has to be traced in disparate spaces beyond the meeting room, such as in tweets or press releases. While doing fieldwork with the EU institutions in Brussels, she observed how live-tweeting of high-stakes diplomatic meetings would reflect things very differently than how the meetings, which she attended, were actually happening. It became clear that these diplomacy meetings had multiple lives, and she needed multiple kinds of methods to gain insight into each. Patchwork ethnography is helpful for dealing with such patchy multiplicities.
Ultimately, the realization that her research object couldn’t be contained, that it was indeed patchy, may retrospectively not be that surprising. This is part of the magic of the ethnographic method: that you don’t know what you are looking for until it has been seen. In this spirit, the Patchwork Ethnography Manifesto was both inspiring and liberating as a way to conceptualize, speak, and write about the instability of the field. It resonated with modes of research in her field, International Relations, where people are already more likely to do shorter research trips, and she sees a lot of promise in thinking through patchwork ethnographies in this space.
Kristin Anabel Eggeling is a Postdoc at the University of Copenhagen. kristin.eggeling[at]ifs.ku.dk / @KEggeling / Learn more about Kristin’s project here, and see how she applies this approach to studying diplomacy here, here, and here.