Patchwork ethnography “really provided a haven for folks who didn’t know how to understand their experience otherwise.”
Rachel Howard
02 June 2021
Published: 08 December 2021
Image by Rachel Howard.
Grief has structured Rachel Howard’s graduate research in multiple ways. Her research questions were based upon observing multiple family members and mentors become sick and die. Then, after setting up preliminary fieldwork in Arizona, the pandemic hit. Given her research with aging communities, this had an immediate impact on her work. She had to decide whether to leave Arizona, leave her apartment, leave her new relationships there, without a known timeline of return. Despite many experiences of fieldwork being difficult and isolating in early 2020, it had actually been good and affirming so far. It was hard to lose that. It moreover felt unethical and inauthentic to separate these hard events, this grief, from her research practice. When the Patchwork Ethnography manifesto came out, it helped her understand what had happened and how to move forward. Patchwork requires the researcher to think about themselves as more than just an instrument. Despite wanting to hold so tightly onto the things she had had, and not wanting anything to change, she stopped and said goodbye: to Chicago, her institutional base, in order to ride out the pandemic with her partner in LA; to the kind of ethnographic project she thought would be possible; and to the bandaid research-like video interviews that had not, for her, been generative.
She’s now at an inflection point, continuously figuring out how to move forward. She does a couple weeks of fieldwork in Arizona, which is within driving distance, and then spends a couple weeks in LA. She’s more reflective about her research practices, considering what’s best for her. Still, it hasn’t been easy. Going in and out of the mindset of fieldwork is different. It feels like a strange, out-of-life time that’s not fully real. She’s been questioning why it feels not part of life. She hadn’t realized how much she’d held on to old ideas of what ethnographic research looks like; it’s hard to change a method. Patchwork ethnography, though, creates space for another way of being an anthropologist.
Rachel Howard is a PhD Candidate at the University of Chicago. rhoward3[at]uchicago.edu / @rsh2127 / Check out Rachel’s writing on grief/mourning as ethnographic orientation here and here.