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Paper short abstract

How might some of the ruptures in conventional fieldwork practice enable an attention to restorative relations through ways of centering care in the doing of work on the field? This paper will discuss the role of care in/and/as a means to crip anthropological knowledge production in current times.

Paper long abstract

How might some of the ruptures in conventional fieldwork practice generated by current geopolitical conditions also enable an attention to restorative relations through ways of centering care in the doing of work on the field? Drawing upon the author’s experiences as a disabled researcher doing fieldwork (Fernandes 2021) during COVID-19, this paper offers a reflection on the role that illness plays in stitching together fieldwork. The paper will discuss how wholeness and care can enable the work of patchworking ethnographic methods (cf. Gunel, Varma and Watanabe 2020) during fieldwork. It will also demonstrate how crip carework in/and/as ethnographic method can play a crucial role in shaping the contours of the field.

Since the start of COVID-19, disability has shifted as a transforming and rapidly expanding category, a space of identity and belonging that is continually changing even as it is being defined. Attending to the responsibilities that come with how disability shifts, and what these shifts mean for fieldwork, this paper will follow theorizations of chronic illness methodology to ask: what methodological possibilities might emerge through an engagement with the simultaneous work of carework and/as fieldwork? The paper draws upon three vignettes from mutual aid work during the second wave of COVID-19 in India (April – May 2021), happening simultaneously during the author’s dissertation fieldwork. Through these vignettes, the paper will work to (a) engage with how risk in field relations comes to redefine the boundaries of the field and (b) examine how fieldwork can facilitate crip potentialities for wholeness.