Patchwork ethnography is “helpful for thinking about how to compose a field,” especially when you question where the field is “supposed to be” or your own field “doesn’t feel quite real.”
Nick Seaver
08 June 2021
Published: 08 December 2021
Image by Erick Butler.
Nick Seaver had been told his dissertation research, visiting dispersed engineers of algorithmic music recommender systems, looked more like a second project than a dissertation project. Graduate students were assumed to have the kind of availability that made long-term, single-sited conventional ethnography possible. But his interest was not in a single corporation; rather, he wanted to understand the shared ways of thinking across a landscape of corporate and academic sites. Patchwork ethnography gives a name to this kind of distributed, sporadic fieldwork, which can be especially useful for anthropologists studying up in technoscientific settings. There’s no single kind of fieldwork that’s adequate for every research question, and patchwork ethnography is not simply a compromise, but can be a principled way of approaching patchy phenomena. Attending international conferences with his interlocutors, visiting their labs, spending stretches of time in their offices—all of these activities comprised a patchy field that sometimes blurred into "home." Visions of multi-sited fieldwork often suggest that researchers might heroically traverse a whole network of sites; but where access challenges proliferate, researchers often have to make do with what they have. Patchwork ethnography reflects how anthropologists themselves author the unity of the field, under conditions that are not under their own control.
Nick Seaver is an Assistant Professor at Tufts University. nick.seaver@tufts.edu / @npseaver