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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.