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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.