“I hadn’t given myself the allowance for the stitching to show” in the first book.
Kregg Hetherington
12 April 2021
Published: 13 May 2021
Image by Kregg Hetherington.
We always stitch together our ethnographic narratives, but it’s different to not only recognize but embrace this as a way of making and writing an argument. For his second book, Kregg Hetherington sought to write in a way that was not about things fitting together perfectly. What if we didn’t strive to make as “tight” of an argument? This reflected the nature of the book’s research, for which it was difficult to get into the immersive space he had been trained for due to circumstances around family and jobs. Working against the mythos of a long immersive experience, he instead conceived of his work as a “composite ethnography,” breaking down the object of study into composite, multiple, and additive forms.
Such composite ethnography also works against the mythos of the individual researcher. It’s generative for collaboration, and moreover allows for a range of types of collaboration to fit varying situations of researchers and interlocutors. He fosters this through the Ethnography Lab he coordinates, and the Montreal Waterways Project, a collaborative project in which students can explore different modes of possibility for doing ethnography and representing ethnographic multiplicity.
Kregg Hetherington is an Associate Professor at Concordia University. kregg.hetherington[at]concordia.ca / @krether