Patchwork Ethnography Workshop

05 February 2021

Participants: Saygun Gökariksel, Gökçe Günel, Saiba Varma, Chika Watanabe, Jessica Barnes, Alexia Arani, Emma Varley, Malika Bahovadinova, Jonathan Echeverri Zuluaga, Peter Redfield, Jessica Cattelino, Rihan Yeh, Jordan Kraemer

 

At a closed workshop in February 2021, we brainstormed around the concept and tools of patchwork ethnography. The following are potential future avenues of inquiry that emerged from this collective work:

  • Patchwork ethnography as a method: How do we revisit or reflect on past fieldwork experiences that may have been interrupted or disrupted?

  • Patchwork as the embodiment of insecurity/precarity in neoliberal crisis: How do the methods and theories of patchwork ethnography resonate with forms of precarity that structure academic life (for example, houselessness or financial precarities)? How do we theorize patchwork without entrenching the problematic conditions of labor in the university? How do we recognize the blurriness between personal and academic lives, but also protect that division to fight the prevalence of overwork culture? How can patchwork ethnography enable a slowing down, a resistance against the impetus to produce more? 

  • Temporality of fieldwork: How can patchwork ethnography help us re-evaluate the ideal of long-term fieldwork? Long-term fieldwork might not be part of all anthropological orthodoxies around the world; how does patchwork ethnography fit into a global archive of anthropological practices? 

  • Patchwork as writing: What kind of writing is elicited through patchwork? How do we make visible the work of decontextualizing and recontextualizing what we do in our writing? How do we “make the stitches visible”? How can we write for multiple audiences?

  • Fieldwork relations: What kinds of relations become possible through patchwork? If long-term fieldwork immerses us in daily routines, what happens to ethnographic knowledge and practices when that routine is gone? How do we think about the relationships that emerge through patchwork ethnography, such as with research assistants or other collaborators? How do we maintain relationships with our interlocutors? What kinds of collaborations become possible through patchwork? 

This workshop received support from the Department of Anthropology at Rice University.