Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper presents “Tactile Fieldnotes”, a multimodal ethnographic method made during fieldwork to record encounters with interlocutors in a quilting community. I reflect on how “making” shapes “knowing”, asking how apprenticeship and sensory practice can cultivate understanding and connection.

Paper long abstract

This paper presents my visual and sensory research, a stitched book of “Tactile Fieldnotes” made during long-term ethnographic research (2018–2025) with a quilting community in South Manchester, Northwest England. The quilting group is a collective of older women who come together each week to show, make, and talk about quilts. Methodologically, the stitched book is both a way of documenting the community and a creative ethnographic method. It is a practice-based, experimental approach to recording, created alongside (and at times in place of) fieldnotes. Each square is produced within the group, and the ethnographic experiences are congealed, stitch by stitch, into a collection of fabric pages.

Making is, on one level, a technique of fitting in. Apprenticeship becomes a tactic employed by the researcher to bridge a common ground. It grants a shared conversation topic and a practice-in-common through which to better comprehend the rules and praxis of quiltmaking. Making as a method enables the ethnographer to reach into the more-than-representational. As such, apprenticeship within communities of making is not merely a case of technical transmission but, as Trevor Marchand describes, the “formation of person” (2008).

I show how making, as a creative research method, celebrates the mode of knowledge production in which my interlocutors work. Using a multimodal approach to fieldwork that combines ethnographic enquiry with the embodied, this sensory form of engagement offers the researcher a way to cultivate understanding and affinity within the community of practice.