These sets of exercises offer an introduction to ethnographic research methods that incorporate patchwork ethnography, a research project that started by asking how researchers’ subject positions shape the processes of anthropological knowledge production. These units can be combined with and adapted to different methodological classes, although we do recommend keeping the “packaging” and order of the exercises as below (but they can be interspersed with other units in between).
Students will be encouraged to reflect on their own subject positions as people in the world—not just researchers, but differently-abled persons, children of particular parents, carers of others, classed, gendered, racialized, and other kinds of subject positions—and map how these positions impact their research projects. The activities are intended to frame the teaching and learning of participant observation, interviewing, writing field notes, and other research methods. By engaging in the exercises outlined below, students will develop an ethnographic sensibility that centers on who they are in the world, and how their methodological considerations should take account of their structural positioning and conditioning.