Month-long intervals between shorter research trips “gave space for me to breathe, to process everything, and to be safe.”
Seda Saluk
28 April 2021
Published: 13 May 2021
Image by Seda Saluk.
Seda Saluk entered the field under the conditions of a recent coup in her fieldsite and home, Turkey, and a tumultuous political context. Both herself and her healthcare interlocutors had been targeted by the current president, making it difficult to establish trust. Multiple breaks throughout her research in which she returned to her PhD institution in the US were necessary space for reflection and safety. Patchwork ethnography offered a different analytic lens for her understanding of such fieldwork processes, which weren’t openly validated. In addition to ethnography in authoritarian contexts, patchwork also spoke to her experience as an international non-citizen scholar who has always faced challenges with visas and granting agency travel requirements.
Seda’s non-consecutive fieldwork schedule furthermore gave her more time in the long run to build relations, and the intervals helped her process data and strategize next steps. She was able to produce certain insights easier and earlier due to this time for reflection. For her, frameworks like patchwork ethnography ultimately open a space to talk about these common but often unacknowledged challenges of fieldwork, yet also see them not as challenges but ways of producing knowledge.
Seda Saluk is a Postdoc at the University of Michigan. ssaluk[at]umich.edu / @sedasaluk