Log in to star items.
- Convenors:
-
Chika Watanabe
(University of Manchester)
Gokce Gunel (Rice University)
Send message to Convenors
- Formats:
- Lightning panel
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?
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
Drawing on research on legacies of post-war displacements in Central Europe, this presentation advocates for the development of a new vocabulary to better capture the diverse realities of contemporary ethnographic practice.
Paper long abstract
Drawing on the concept of Patchwork Ethnography, this presentation examines how ethnographic practice is shaped by everyday decisions about child care, commuting, and caregiving responsibilities. I focus on my research in post-displacement Central Europe, specifically on the material remnants left by expelled populations after 1945 and subsequently utilized by incoming populations and their descendants. I connect the fragmented and partial nature of my data with the dispersed and episodic character of my fieldwork, arguing for the significance of such practices that often fall outside conventional definitions of ethnography. This presentation advocates for the development of new vocabulary to better capture the diverse realities of contemporary ethnographic practice.
Paper short abstract
This article discussed ordinary life and anthropological norms in a ruptured world through the experiences of an undergraduate's daily life and anthropological studies across different places and times. It also explores patchwork across the temporal dimension and considers a more open writing form.
Paper long abstract
In this article, I will take people into a segment of my life journey. This journey originated from a question, "Why do we live like that?", which was brought by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, and accompanied me from the beginning of my study of anthropology until now, when I am about to apply to graduate school.
This article started from my “clumsy” imitation of past fieldwork discipline during my field trip in Thailand and Hong Kong. However, when I returned to my home, Hefei, to write, the events I had experienced and the observations I had conducted continually surfaced and haunted in my mind, eventually enabling me to complete the question I had at the beginning of this journey. I discuss two aspects. On the one hand, I discuss two worlds: reflections and practices of ordinary life and the switching norms of the anthropological academic world in the ruptured world after the pandemic, as well as my experience of living simultaneously in these two worlds. On the other hand, I extend patchwork to the temporal dimension, showing how those past stories and the people answered my question through their haunting presence.
In summary, through this article, I hope to provide conceptual tools for understanding and critiquing our post-pandemic forms of life, and to explore the relationship between patchy experiences and the grand existential questions that we all have to face. More importantly, I hope to show how anthropology can open a more inclusive door to people.
Paper short abstract
Fatigue is so central to the visceral experience of caring for others. And yet, tiredness is seen as a barrier to thinking. How might we create space for fatigued thinking, which may not follow a plot or argument, but has its own momentum and rawness?
Paper long abstract
In this paper, I reflect on the relationship between fatigue and fieldwork. In the early months of my fieldwork in Delhi, India, sleep did not come easily. During this time, I spent many languid summer afternoons with Rasheeda, a young mother who often complained of feeling lethargic and tired. I reflect on the ways in which she spoke about her fatigue, both in an immediate (interrupted nights) and a more existential sense (feeling lethargic, overwhelmed by familial obligations). As we tried to lift each other out of each other’s lethargy, despite the vastly different circumstances of our lives, fatigue became a language through which we alluded to – without explicitly naming – the things in our lives that caused us to lose sleep. As I reflect on these moments and follow my trailing thoughts, I think about the ways in which fatigue is so central to the visceral experience of caring for others. And yet, like caregiving, tiredness is seen as a barrier to creativity and intellectual life. How might we create space for fatigued thinking, which may not follow a plot or argument, but has its own momentum and rawness?
Paper short abstract
This paper conceptualizes patchwork ethnography aligned with Strathern’s “partial connections.” Drawing on my fieldwork in Spain as a doctoral student and mother of three, I show how research unfolds between singularities and repetitions, shaping relational political life in temporal rhythm.
Paper long abstract
This paper conceptualizes patchwork ethnography as an ontologically grounded method aligned with Marilyn Strathern’s notion of partial connections and an anthropological understanding of life as unfolding between singularity and repetition. While patchwork ethnography is often described as a pragmatic response to contemporary fieldwork constraints, this paper argues that it also resonates with a relational and temporal ontology in which everyday routines and singular moments are mutually constitutive.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork with supporters of a right-wing populist party in Spain as a doctoral student and mother of three, my research was shaped by care responsibilities, limited mobility, and discontinuous access to the field. Rather than framing these conditions as methodological shortcomings, I show how they attuned my research to the rhythmic reproduction of political life across repetition and contingency.
Through repeated stroller walks across politically marked urban spaces, recurring encounters with campaign materials, and singular moments at political events attended with my children, I encountered political support as a practice continually reassembled through everyday routines, material objects, affective encounters, and relational ties. These moments suggest that political belonging is neither a stable identity nor a bounded group position, but an ongoing relational process.
By bringing together partial connections, patchwork ethnography, and attention to the interplay between repetition and contingency, this paper proposes a methodological perspective that moves beyond totalizing or static models of political belonging. Attending to the temporal rhythm of everyday life offers a way to approach politically sensitive worlds without presuming coherence, stability, or complete ethnographic access.
Paper short abstract
Patchwork ethnography is often framed as a methodological choice. Drawing on transnational research conducted from a position of constrained mobility, care responsibilities, and geopolitical fragmentation, this paper argues that patchwork is also an ontological condition of knowledge production.
Paper long abstract
Patchwork ethnography is often framed as a methodological response to disrupted fieldwork, institutional precarity, or limited mobility. In this paper, I argue that patchwork ethnography is not a choice but an ontological condition—one that emerges at the intersection of biography, geopolitics, care, and transnational belonging.
The paper draws on my doctoral research on transnational identities, postmemory, and intergenerational mobility among descendants of Lithuanian exiles from Siberia, which resonated my own lived Siberian-Polish experience. Re-entering academia as a mature PhD student and building a second research career after the age of forty, while migrating with a child and without reliable support or an established social network, I conduct ethnography from a position of constrained mobility and ongoing care obligations. My fieldwork unfolds in fragments mimicing life: family archives and grieving, interviews and episodic trips across securitized borders, institutional silences, and moments of analysis woven into everyday caregiving routines and dealing with uncertainty.
This patchwork mirrors the very object of my research. Siberian heritage, inherited trauma, essentialised nationalism, and transnational identity are lived and researched simultaneously, producing a constant movement between autobiography and ethnography, and method. Rather than treating this entanglement as bias or methodological weakness, I conceptualize it as an epistemic resource that makes visible the intersectional conditions under which transnational lives are navigated and narrated.
By foregrounding the intertwining of lived and researched experience, this contribution argues for patchwork ethnography as a mode of research that is particularly attuned to transnationality, postmemory and uneven life trajectories in a polarised world.
Paper short abstract
Drawing on my undergraduate and masters research, I suggest that patchwork ethnography is a product of cultivation. Far from being the ‘easy option’, it requires and develops specific skills. And, just like a cultivated plant, the final ethnography patchwork emerges and surprises the researcher.
Paper long abstract
Drawing on my undergraduate and masters ethnographic research, this paper invites us to consider a fundamental methodological shift: What would it mean for the discipline if we started treating continuous, long-term fieldwork as the exception, not the rule? We must critically examine what the historical preference for uninterrupted research implies about the researchers it has marginalized.
This paper argues that patchwork ethnography is not the 'easy option,' but is instead a product of cultivation. Like any craft, it demands significant labor and time to hone. My own experience was challenging; reflecting on the struggles where circumstance required this approach showed me that achieving the ideal careful, systematic work is hard-won. The rigor demands specific skills unknowingly learnt during the process—capacities like robust time management, creating systems, and maintaining inductive curiosity. This practiced labor has historically been the necessary alternative for researchers, particularly women and those with care responsibilities, who had to negotiate alternatives to the autonomous fieldworker ideal.
The true moment of insight is the surprise when the research all ‘comes together’. Just like a cultivated plant emerging from careful tending, the final patchwork ethnography unexpectedly comes together. By recognising this systematic rigour, we might be able to establish a more inclusive and relevant methodological standard for the future of the discipline.
Paper short abstract
This paper presents "Auto-Mobile," a patchwork ethnography of a 3,828-mile road trip. Viewing the car as a methodological “exoskeleton” for an F-1 visa holder, I explore how a legal “alien” navigates a polarized motorscape, turning breakdown and disruption into analytic hinges.
Paper long abstract
For an international scholar on an F-1 visa, mobility is always conditional, and “home” becomes a temporary permit. This paper presents Auto-Mobile, a multimodal patchwork ethnography grounded in a 3,828-mile winter round trip between Austin and New York City. I conceptualize the Mini Cooper convertible not merely as a vehicle, but as a methodological “exoskeleton”—a prosthetic device that sustains the “alien” body within a polarized national motorscape.
Drawing on Patchwork Ethnography’s focus on “seamfulness,” I operationalize road disruptions as analytic hinges rather than noise. I analyze a collision with an uninsured truck in rural Virginia through a dual lens of class precarity and Learning Disability—operationalized here simultaneously as my disciplinary framework and a situational condition. Here, the breakdown is not a failure of transit, but a revelation of where the “infrastructure of privilege” collapses. This moment demonstrates how accountability, safety, and repair are unevenly distributed.
Simultaneously, the car’s interior functions as a “third space,” stitching together the fragmented realities of a diasporic subject through the “banal discipline” of safety signs and relational bonds forged across the highway. In this lightning presentation, I share excerpts from a zine combining Instax photography and “rest-stop poetry.” Ultimately, this project offers a set of portable patchwork moves for research under constraint: noticing seams, collecting in fragments, and using breakdowns to sharpen rather than derail analysis. This case demonstrates how legal precarity can be reframed as a generative constraint for methodological invention—a strategy relevant to any researcher navigating structural volatility.
Paper short abstract
Chronophotographic sketching is a patchwork ethnography method for fieldwork at physical and affective distance. By sketching without reusing images, it produces non-linguistic thick description of phenomena with full conscience of the gaps and ethical challenges linked to fragmented access.
Paper long abstract
Having to face institutional constraints and geopolitical uncertainty, alongside the discipline’s internal epistemological debates ; ethnographers are permanently exposed to methodological and practical difficulties in their research practice. Patchwork ethnography offers a powerful potential to tackle these challenges, but also attempts to respond to the following question: what methodological crafts can allow ethnographers to access the “field” when the possible modes of presence are made fragmented, mediated, or totally restricted?
This paper presents chronophotographic sketching as an “ethnographic patchwork” for conducting research while being held at both physical and affective distance. Rather than relying on the accumulation of footage, the method is grounded in an ethics of refusal, by rejecting the rediffusion of raw footage. Sequences of movement and embodied gestures are documented through sketches made from fragmented encounters and, when necessary, from time-shifted footage. Sketching becomes an analytical act of sensitive engagement and non-linguistic translation that slows down perception and foregrounds what is often erased by visual capture.
By meddling with both physical and affective distance, chronophotographic sketching comes as an endeavour of “thick description” that acknowledges that ethnographic knowledge can be stitched together unevenly, across fragments and gaps. In doing so, the paper suggests a concrete methodological tool to patchwork ethnography, and invites discussion on how ethnographers can sustain relational research practices in polarized contexts without reproducing dense visual regimes.
Paper short abstract
Ethnographic journaling is a form of embodied analysis of field experiences through illustration and collage. It embraces aesthetic exploration as an act of deep observation and reflexive knowledge production, leaning into the manifold tensions arising in and beyond field encounters.
Paper long abstract
Creative methodologies have blossomed in the last decades, from arts-based research and visual ethnography, to hand-drawn field notes that stand as anthropological treatises on their own. Art has been positioned as a way for researchers to create reflexive knowledge that is both inwardly aware of its subjectivity as well as outwardly open with it. Each patch of pigment pools into visceral acknowledgment of the shaky hands that pulled them into being.
Ethnographic journaling is one such approach to artistic analysis through illustration and collage. Scribbled notes, quotes, paper ephemera, and thumbnail sketches from shorter bursts in “the field” are meticulously illustrated and arranged into journal spreads largely upon return “home.” These compositions juxtapose encounters and sentiments through embodied aesthetics. Their tensions call us to consider if we are truly living in a particularly polarized world, or rather a fundamentally dialectic reality. The extended process and product alike spark a “reexperiencing” of the field that blurs the boundaries of memory and space between both researchers and audiences. It likewise taps into the individual creative voice and symbolic dictionary of each researcher, toeing the line between personal travel journaling and the research endeavor in an acknowledgement of our patchwork lives. Yet the sheer time needed for this process spurs pertinent conversations on how to embed artistic approaches into academic systems that continue to structurally privilege traditional written texts.
Paper short abstract
This paper argues that structured rest and self-care are not interruptions but essential methods in Patchwork Ethnography. Drawing on fieldwork in northeastern India during COVID-19 and menstruation, I demonstrate how centring the researcher’s embodied needs redefines ethnographic rigour.
Paper long abstract
This paper explores how the methodological framework of Patchwork Ethnography transforms periods of necessary rest and self-care from perceived interruptions into a core, generative component of fieldwork. I draw from my research in rural riverine northeastern India, which was fundamentally shaped by the intersecting challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic and the physical demands of menstruation. Confronting the impossibility of conventional, uninterrupted fieldwork, I intentionally structured my research around cyclical returns ‘home’ for recovery and care.
During these breaks, practices such as peer debriefing, reflective journaling, and embroidery became vital methodological tools. Far from being idle time, these activities constituted essential emotional and analytical labour-processing experiences, centring my embodied reality, and preparing for subsequent engagement. This approach allowed me to challenge the enduring myth of the detached, ever-present ethnographer and to critically engage with what constitutes “rigor.”
By framing rest as a deliberate method, I argue that Patchwork Ethnography formally recognises the researcher’s body and well-being as central to knowledge production. It treats ethnography as inseparable from emotional labour and legitimises the frequent moving between field and home. Ultimately, this practice demystifies heroic fieldwork models and proposes a more sustainable, inclusive, and ethically attuned ethnographic practice - one that makes rigorous research possible for a more diverse academic community by acknowledging our shared, human complexities.
Paper short abstract
This presentation combines patchwork ethnography with Freirean dialogue in research with Sudanese refugees in Cairo. Following life-history interviews conducted via social media. It centres co-theorising as a product of relational demands that patchwork ethnography highlights.
Paper long abstract
This presentation shows how combining patchwork ethnography with Freirean dialogue addresses ethical challenges in refugee research. Drawing on my research with Sudanese refugees in Cairo, this shows that patchwork ethnography's acknowledgment of seamfulness can centre interlocutors as co-theorists.
Unable to ‘do’ fieldwork in Egypt due to ethical and financial constraints, I conducted life-history interviews via WhatsApp and Messenger. However, patchwork extends beyond this data collection. Following interviews, I engage interlocutors in Freirean dialogue - presenting my theoretical interpretations and inviting them to affirm, refuse, or modify my analysis.
This traces how constraints shaped insight (focusing on meaning-making rather than observation), how my prior commitments as a refugee protection worker constitute rather than contaminate the research, and how Freirean dialogue responds to patchwork ethnography's implicit question: if we acknowledge that research is shaped by relational entanglements, how do we avoid extractive knowledge production? Dialogue extends patchwork's logic: if the seamfulness of research is visible, the seams of theorizing should be too.
Paper short abstract
As a medical anthropologist working between social sciences and medical sciences, and conducting research with patients and medical doctors, I use patchwork ethnography to explore the often "seam-full" encounters between distinct disciplinary norms and my interlocutors' diverse worldviews.
Paper long abstract
Building from my contribution to your forthcoming book "Patchwork Ethnography: A Methodological Guide", I explore how I conceptualised and used patchwork ethnography during my doctoral research on hormonal contraceptive use in the UK.
As a medical anthropologist working between social sciences and medical sciences, and conducting research with patients and medical doctors, I experienced many "seam-full" encounters between distinct disciplinary norms and my interlocutors' everyday experiences. My anthropological methods and norms were questioned by medical scientists who had final approval on my project design, and any resultant changes were consequently of concern to anthropologists and social scientists. It was a fraught territory, resulting in many awkward and ambivalent scenarios.
When I eventually began fieldwork, tensions persisted. Moving between medical clinics and patient-based advocacy spaces sometimes felt incongruent, where different and potentially polarizing narratives about hormonal contraceptives circulated.
I constantly found myself moving between "patches" of distinct disciplinary norms and interlocutors' diverse worldviews. Building on the vocabulary encouraged by patchwork ethnography, I view these (sometimes) distinct disciplines and viewpoints as patches and explore how I have sewn and walked seams between them to build the patchwork of my research landscape.