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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.