Short Abstract

Intersecting responsibilities at home, institutional pressures, and geopolitical uncertainties make uninterrupted long-term fieldwork difficult for many ethnographers today. Patchwork ethnography is one possible way to rethink research from our shared relational entanglements in a polarising world.

Long Abstract

Patchwork Ethnography offers a new way to acknowledge and accommodate how researchers’ lives, in their full complexity, shape knowledge production. It is a methodological guide that foregrounds how none of us conduct fieldwork exclusively without other life obligations and relations. This focus on the seamfulness of research reveals the entanglements between “home” and “field,” the indeterminacies between “data” and daily life, and the moves of contextualization and decontextualization as we refine our analyses. Imagine how ethnographic research might change if we create space for researchers to openly acknowledge that we stitch together the personal with the professional in uneven ways. Would it become not only relevant but also doable for a more diverse group of people? Patchwork ethnography aspires to create an expansive academic community with room to breathe.

This lightning panel, proposed as a hybrid format, uses our forthcoming book, Patchwork Ethnography: A Methodological Guide (University of Chicago Press, 2026), as a launchpad to collaboratively discuss with presenters and audiences the present and the future of ethnographic research. The book includes ten short essays from early-career scholars, and they will be invited to present. However, we also hope to select paper submissions from others we have not met before, ideally across different generations. In an increasingly polarised world, could patchwork ethnography offer a pause to discuss our shared challenges and strategies to bridge the home/field divide, as we all juggle multiple relational commitments? Could ethnographic research constitute a bond across differences in a multipolar world?

This Lightning Panel has 6 pending paper proposals.
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