
==== Front
Aust Fem Stud
Aust Fem Stud
Australian Feminist Studies
0816-4649
1465-3303
Routledge

2372622
10.1080/08164649.2024.2372622
Version of Record
Feminist Forum
Research Article
Everything is Patchwork! A Conversation about Methodological Experimentation with Patchwork Ethnography
AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST STUDIES
G. GÜNEL ET AL.
Günel Gökçe a
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5170-1585
Watanabe Chika b
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2591-0820
Jungnickel Kat c
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1390-2180
Coleman Rebecca d
a Department of Anthropology, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA
b Department of Social Anthropology, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
c Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London, London, UK
d School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
CONTACT Kat Jungnickel k.jungnickel@gold.ac.uk
29 7 2024
2023
29 7 2024
38 115-116 Creating Feminist Futures: Research Methodologies for New Times. Guest Editor: Rebecca Coleman and Kat Jungnickel 211229
20 6 2024
21 6 2024
Nova techset27 6 2024
Converted to JATS 1.2 by Nova Techset27 6 2024
© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2024
The Author(s)
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.

ABSTRACT

This article collectively discusses creative feminist approaches to ethnographic methods developed in response to challenging social, personal, environmental, and temporal conditions and pressures. Patchwork Ethnography, developed by Gökçe Günel, Saiba Varma and Chika Watanabe, recognises mundane pressures, and works with insights and experiences that emerge not only from doing research, but from what happens around the edges. By rendering the many ‘seams’ of research visible and valuable, their approach aims to develop creative, kind, and more generous – yet no less robust – research realities. Drawing inspiration from Patchwork Ethnography this article takes a creative approach to the craft of conversation, valuing the fragments, drawing attention to edges and intersections of our collective thinking, research, and experiences and stitching them together into a unique patchworked piece. Throughout, in the spirit of the theme of this special issue, we ask what kinds of ethnographic methods can create new and different futures? What are, or could be, feminist futures of ethnography?

KEYWORDS

Collaboration
entanglement
ethnography
experimentation
futures
methods
patchwork
European Research Council 10.13039/501100000781 European Union’s Horizon 2020 10.13039/501100007601 819458 The Politics of Patents project led by Kat Jungnickel has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme [grant number 819458].
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pmcEthnography is a widely used qualitative method with a long histories in many disciplines in and outside academia. Fundamentally, an ethnographer immerses themselves in the social, cultural, and material worlds of others and attempts to see the world through their eyes. They gain an in-depth understanding of a culture from the point of view of its participants in their own environment. As such, notions of the field have long been considered central to the production of rich ethnographic data. However, the world has changed radically since Clifford Geertz (1998) emphasised the importance of ‘being there’ for long lengths of time to claim ethnographic authority. The realities for many involve a plethora of constant and complicated pressures, with few able to leave home to spend months, if not years, in the field.

A vast body of methodological innovations have emerged in response to these challenges, from George Marcus (1995) who encouraged researchers to ethnographically ‘follow the thing’ to Ulf Hannerz (2003) who drew attention to the realities of ‘being there … and there … and there!’ in shorter multi-sited studies due to the pressures of personal and professional commitments. Researchers have explored networked fields, included the commute to and from multiples sites, disrupted the notion of the ‘field’ using flexible and multiple approaches, and connected vast data sites of practice – to point to just a few innovations (Burrell 2009; Green 1999; Jungnickel 2014; Knowles 2014; Knox and Nafus 2018; Tsing 2005).

As generative as these many innovations are, ethnography remains difficult to pin down. Some have argued that it is such an ‘overused term’ that it has lost its meaning and ‘broke loose from its moorings’ (Ingold 2014, 383). It is difficult to do and demanding to teach. A common understanding is that ethnographic expertise is largely developed in the field; it is as much practice as preparation (Hammersley and Atkinson 2019). This is because ethnographic insights emerge not only from doing research, but from what happens around the edges. It’s about trying to do it, stumbling, making mistakes, getting sidetracked, being surprised, wasting time, and failing. And then making sense of it, through gaining distance perhaps, or through further immersions. On top of this, as indicated above, researchers have ever-increasing commitments, in the forms of teaching timetables, grant and writing deadlines, family responsibilities, personal life and health issues, and other ordinary entanglements. These overlapping worlds are shaped by neo-liberal pressures, reduced funding and precarious contracts, a global pandemic, wars, travel restrictions, reduced social support and cost-of-living crisis and much more. How are we meant to do ethnography now?

Few of these issues are new to feminist ethnographers. Feminist practices and approaches to ethnography have long drawn attention to the overlaps of the personal and political by highlighting the voices, concerns, and experiences of marginalised peoples, and particularly the lives of those who identify as women. As Bev Skeggs (2001) classically argued, feminist ethnography offers a way to ‘reformulate traditional research agendas’ to get at what bell hooks (1989) calls ‘a view from below’. Working in and with communities of practice, collaboratively, and across disciplines to explore gendered issues in relation to class, race and disability have been central to much feminist ethnographic practice. There is a commitment to ethical responsibilities and, as Dàna-Ain Davis and Crista Craven write, of ‘[b]eing critically attuned to issues of representation – who and what is represented and who decides’ (2023, 4). In the spirit of the theme of this special issue, we ask what kinds of ethnographic methods can create new and different futures? What are, or could be, feminist futures of ethnography?

It is in this context that we wanted to talk with Gökçe Günel and Chika Watanabe about their Patchwork Ethnography project to further explore issues such as these. In June 2020, Günel, Saiba Varma, and Watanabe published ‘A Manifesto for Patchwork Ethnography’. In this short essay, they reflected on the challenges of doing long-term fieldwork in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, university pressures, gendered work practices, and the climate crisis, amongst others. They drew attention to how researchers innovatively work with and around these challenges. ‘Rather than see the multiple commitments of researchers as constraints’, they set out to ‘reflect on what forms of knowledge and methodologies emerge in and through researchers’ life and work commitments’ (2020, np). Their distinctive feminist approach recognises the potential of distributed pieces and pressures and stitching fieldwork with personal experiences.

Their essay struck a chord with many struggling with how to do research in new ways. The pressure is very real, especially for early career scholars, those employed on precarious contracts and/or with caring responsibilities. In another article on the concept, Günel and Watanabe write about being contacted by a researcher expressing ‘a sigh of relief’ due to the ‘secret shame’ they had been carrying of failing to do ethnography ‘properly’ (2024, 131). This is striking considering the flexibility and openness at the heart of ethnographic methods. Yet, few have time (freedom or energy) to fail in research. As Sybille Lammes et al. write: ‘While there has been a lot of celebration of failure in entrepreneurial technology speak (“fail bigger and better”)’ at its core, research has to be ‘flexible to the reality of humanness’ because the reality is for many that ‘failure is not just an experiment – they don’t have the privilege or power’ (2022, 12).

Patchwork is a familiar feminist concept, another reason the essay caught people’s attention. Like many women’s craft-based ideas, it is far from new. It builds on long and textured histories of women’s needle-based skills, socially shaped and politically performed. In Rozika Parker’s classic book, The Subversive Stitch, for example, she explores embroidery as ‘the means of educating women into the feminine ideal’, while also ‘provid[ing] a weapon of resistance to the constraints of femininity’ (2012, ix). More broadly, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari reflect on patchwork as an ‘amorphous collection of juxtaposed pieces that can be joined together in an infinite number of ways’ (1987, 526). Maura Flannery calls it a ‘feminist metaphor for scientific enquiry’, arguing that patchwork offers a creative, communal and collaborative alternative to more ‘aggressive and alienating’ narratives of the lone ‘genius’ that tends to dominate science (2001, 628, 635). In their collaborative doctoral dissertation, Kristina Lindstrom and Åsa Ståhl explore patchwork as a ‘way of knowing’ that ‘rests on relational ontology and situated knowledges’ (2014, 24). From their research using mobile sewing circles, where people embroidered SMS text messages which were then sewn together, they developed what they called ‘patchworking publics-in-the-making’. This hands-on, material methodology offered a way to understand how people were ‘dealing with distributed accountabilities and the multiple uncertainties related to living with technologies’ (2014, 47). In her analysis of her encounter in the Dorset County Museum with Valentine Ackland’s patchwork jacket, sewn for her by her lover, the writer Sylvia Townsend Warner, Maryanne Dever (2023) explores how the jacket ‘is not only a new synthetic object, but also a memory object, one in which each randomised fragment carries strong associative possibilities’ (2023, 95). For Dever, these varied patchworked possibilities open up understandings of the roles of materials and art – especially those artistic practices considered domestic or women’s craft – in developing ‘new forms of intimacy that challenged the confines of heterosexuality’ (2023, 99).

Applying ideas around patchwork to ethnography, Günel, Varma, and Watanabe call for a feminist reworking of a much loved and used method, reflecting on its past and reconfiguring it for an uncertain future. Their aim is to ‘render ethnographic research more inclusive, and not just for the handful who can afford long stretches of time in the ‘field’’ (2020, np). It offers an approach that recognises mundane pressures, works with and values fragments, and, to borrow from Donna Haraway (2016) ‘stays with the trouble’ generated in the new realities of research experience. By rendering the ‘seams’ visible, and valuable, Patchwork Ethnography invites more creative, kind, and more generous – yet no less robust – ways of understanding the worlds we live in and study. Günel and Watanabe continue to develop the idea and welcome responses from an array of interdisciplinary researchers. In this final section of our special issue, we invited them to talk with us and reflect on the development of their research and how it relates to the core themes of this special issue on feminist futures and methodologies.

———-

‘Patchwork’ as a term has many definitions. It is known as ‘the craft of sewing in which small pieces of cloth in different designs, colours, or textures are sewn together’ and ‘a thing composed of many different elements so as to appear variegated’ (Cambridge Dictionary np). It is also sometimes known as ‘pieced work’ and ‘something made up of various parts’ (Figure 1). We reflect on these definitions in relation to the experience of being in conversation together, in the following transcript, and our own individual ethnographic training, projects and research trajectories. Drawing inspiration from Patchwork Ethnography, this article takes a creative approach to the craft of conversation. We combine questions and responses at the time of the interview and added later, with links to publications, ethnographic reflections and images. Throughout, as much as is possible, we draw attention to the edges and overlaps of these differently textured and shaped pieces and attempt to stitch them together. The computer plots our four faces on the screen. It’s a weekday afternoon in November 2023 and we are all in different countries, cities, clothes, weathers, time zones and rooms. Rebecca Coleman (Bristol), Gökçe Günel (Houston), Kat Jungnickel (London) and Chika Watanabe (Manchester). Our four-part collective is in winter and summer; morning and afternoon; at home and in the office; in t-shirts and thick jumpers; ready for the day and wearily looking forward to dinner. The Zoom platform stitches us all together into this digital patchwork. We begin to talk. Figure 1. Patchwork pieces stitched together.

———- Beckie: Can you start by telling us how Patchwork Ethnography came about, and what you've been doing with it?

Chika: It came about because Gökçe, Saiba, and I had been talking about how difficult it is to do sustained long-term fieldwork in the way that we've been trained after getting permanent jobs. Even before having permanent jobs, it was hard to take time out to go away for long periods of time and no one had prepared us for that. So, we were just chatting among friends. I can't remember when exactly, because it was just part of our conversation as friends.

Gökçe: In 2019, we applied for a grant to explore the project a little bit more. It was a European one that we didn't get. And then we thought maybe we should apply for a Wenner-Gren grant to explore the idea with other people through the seminar format. We did that in late 2019. Danilyn Rutherford, who had recently become the director of Wenner-Gren [Anthropological research funder], was quite responsive to that call and encouraged us to explore the idea with others.

Chika: We've written this in other places, but the term, Patchwork Ethnography was just short-hand for talking about this stuff and saying, ‘Oh it seems like we're a patchwork form of ethnography’. So, it was not deeply thought out, just a shorthand among friends to refer to the kind of, you know, research methods that we'd been pushed to do.

Gökçe: What's nice about it is that it was already part of our language before we shared it with the world, so the transition was quite organic in that sense. It was us sort of sharing something that we had developed colloquially with others and we were trying to sharpen it through their input.

———-

Writing about Patchwork Ethnography can be found at: Günel, Gökçe, and Chika Watanabe. 2023. “Patchwork Ethnography.” American Ethnologist: Journal of the American Ethnological Society, Advance online publication December 6, https://dxoi.org/10.1111/amet.13243

Günel, Gökçe, Saiba Varma, and Chika Watanabe. 2020. “A Manifesto for Patchwork Ethnography.” Member Voices, Fieldsights, June 9. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/a-manifesto-for-patchwork-ethnography

Patchwork Ethnography website: https://www.patchworkethnography.com/

———- Beckie: Could you say a little bit more about some of the difficulties of doing ethnography as you'd been traditionally trained to do it?

Chika: I think one was just the impossibility of leaving for a whole year when you have a job. My partner is not an academic and he doesn't live in a world where leaving for months at a time for professional reasons is a normal thing [laughs]. Yeah, so for me, it was difficult to leave, to balance that. I just couldn't leave for long periods of time while wanting to be in the relationship and respect that. And, as you know, we have a lot of administrative duties in British universities. So, I was just pulled in different directions. But also obviously a lot of mothers have written to us. Child-care has been one of the things that have stopped them from doing fieldwork through consecutive time periods and it really spoke to them in that sense. And I think that's a really important part of the work that we're doing. But we've been wanting to emphasise that it's not just about women, child-care, and mothering. It's also about precarity; it's also about disability; it's also about choices that we make. Like I make a choice to not go for too long because of my relationship. So, choices should also be part of it as well. It wasn't necessarily our own experience, but friends had been on long-term precarious contracts with little funding or no funding at all to go do fieldwork. And they really struggled with legitimating that.

Gökçe: There were also visa issues for me. When I was trying to become a permanent resident in the US, there were long periods of time when I couldn’t leave the country to go visit family, let alone for fieldwork. In the first years after my PhD, I was thinking, for the next five years until I get a permanent residency, it's not going to be possible to leave for long periods, coupled with moving from job to job in those early years. So that was one of the reasons we were talking about the idea of patchwork amongst friends. As Chika said, parents have been the most responsive to our call because it's the most immediate care responsibility that really shifts people's priorities. But there are other responsibilities that also make ethnographers rethink their relationships with their work and with the way they understand field work. Kat: Can you tell us about particular theorists who inspired you and helped to shape Patchwork Ethnography?

Chika: One of the things that inspired me was Sara Ahmed's work on feminist phenomenology (2006). I remember reading it in graduate school. In phenomenological philosophy, you don't think about the people who are clearing that desk away for you. My mother has been a stay-at-home mother for most of her life and I lived with my parents during my fieldwork, so my mum did a lot of the ‘desk clearing’. I've always been aware of her role as a stay-at-home mother and, you know, all of the burden and the joy that comes with that. But I never really linked it with how that enabled me to do fieldwork.

So, I think that that really started my thinking about how I can actually theorise and take her role into account when I'm writing my scholarly analyses. So, it’s not just about being auto-ethnographic and self-reflexive but actually making her part of my theorising in some way. For me that was a key inspiration.

Gökçe: I think that what Chika said overlaps nicely with some of the transformations and debates that have taken place in fields like science and technology studies (STS), where the emphasis on innovation and invention is complemented with an emphasis on maintenance and repair. When I teach these topics, I like using Shannon Mattern’s piece (2018) in the Places Journal, given how it foregrounds daily routines. Mattern says in that piece: ‘To study maintenance is itself an act of maintenance’ (2018, np). Patchwork ethnography brings forward the everyday labour that goes into, you know, making fieldwork happen. So we ask, how is the practice of fieldwork actually maintained? Is it an initial idea that gets put into practice seamlessly? As we said before, seamfulness has been something that we've tried to explore in some of our writing, and we study this theme further in the American Ethnologist piece.

But at the same time, by showing how fieldwork happens, and exposing the seams of how the research gets done, patchwork ethnography attempts to preserve fieldwork as a praxis even when it might seem difficult to do so. In some ways, it is an attempt to maintain fieldwork both as a daily commitment and as an epistemological priority.

———-

Chika: Often, I come across things in the world that remind me of patchwork ethnography. The other day I went to an exhibit on Palestinian embroidery at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester (2024). A lot of it was about embroidery but it was, unexpectedly, also about patchworking clothes. For example, this dress came with the following explanation: Dress from Ramallah 1930s

From the collection of Maha Abu Shosheh

The woman who made this dress donated it to another woman, who was expelled from her home during the Nakba of 1948 and arrived in Ramallah with little to wear. The new owner must have been taller than the original maker, as she enlarged the dress with panels at the waist.

The additional material reflects the urgency of the circumstances: she has used sacking from a bag of flour issued to refugees by UNRWA [United National Relief and Works Agency]. The Arabic letter nuun (N) from the word tahin (flour) is still visible on one side of the chest, stamped on the hessian in UN-blue. The garment speaks to the generosity and resilience of women in the face of their radically changed circumstances.

This is a poignant example of repair as well as seamfulness in difficult circumstances. It’s not really about the seams of different competing responsibilities, but the dress is about seams that show how our lives are made in relation to each other; our lives and work are an extension of others. It made me wonder what this would look like in a written form. Kat: That’s such a great example. I do a lot of work with and around sewing in my research into clothing inventions, and I think about the intersections and tensions in the production, use and creative hacking and adapting of material artefacts (see Politics of Patents 2024). So, I'm really struck by the use of the word and the practice of patchwork here. Can you reflect more on the concept, and tell us why it's so meaningful to you?

Gökçe: I think it is so reflective of the kinds of multiple commitments that we were trying to carry forward at the same time, with each patch representing something else. Since we've started using the term, we've done more work on it. And we've started looking at how Black feminist artists would put together different forms of patchwork and they were considered outsider art, but now they're becoming formalised as part of contemporary art practice. Rosie Lee Tompkins work, for instance. [Africa American quiltmaker Tompkins (1936–2006) is renowned for her vibrant designs and colourful material practice.]

And I like how the phrase contains the word ‘work’ in it. There is an actual labour component that is about participating and is key to practice. In addition, when we talked about our project as ‘patchwork ethnography’, it immediately read as a feminist project. This is a feminist project, but we did not purposefully choose the term ‘patchwork’ to indicate its feminist emphasis. We've been thinking about that connection and trying to not take the idea for granted. Why or how does that connection happen? Why does the word ‘patchwork’ immediately evoke feminism?

Chika: I think what's interesting about patchwork ethnography for us has been the way it is like a gift that keeps on giving. Because, through our short little essay, we've got so much feedback. And that feedback has made us think more about what is it that we mean. It's been a very recursive process. And thinking through this has made me realise that I think through my mother a lot. It’s one of the things that I'm trying to look into more in the book that I'm working on right now.

In the book, I explore what I call ‘resourceful preparedness’ in Japan and Chile, which is an approach to disaster preparedness that hinges on repurposing or seeing everyday objects in a different way. For example, preparedness educators often talk about how you can turn shopping bags into slings for broken arms, blankets into stretchers, and newspapers into origami cups and bowls in an emergency. And my mom does this all the time, even if not in a disaster context. A lot of people in Japan do it. There's a lot of repurposing of everyday items for something else. And some of it comes from the lack of resources after the Second World War. It’s about turning t-shirts and socks into rags for cleaning that you take to your primary school, or about patchworking old clothes to turn them into a blanket or slippers. And you know, my mother still does it. During lockdown, she sent me the tops of PET bottles that she had stuffed with cotton and turned into pin cushions. She sent a whole bunch of them to me because she couldn't stand throwing those away. Or she was using my Lego figures from when I was a child. She uses their hands to hold cords for iPhone chargers. It actually really works! (Figure 2) She’s also part of a volunteer group in our neighbourhood in Japan and they make slippers out of old clothes (Figure 3). Figure 2. Chika’s mother’s improvisational use of Lego figures to hold phone chargers and cables.

Figure 3. Slippers that Chika’s mother makes from old clothes.

Chika: I focus on the dynamics of reparative improvisation and a playful approach to everyday life that underpin disaster preparedness education in Japan and Chile. Instead of a tone of fear and emergency, I found a community of people across these two countries who are giving people the space to practice improvisation in light-hearted ways and rehearse how one might repurpose ordinary objects and relationships for future survival. My research interlocutors are obviously one main source of this thinking, but my mother is also another life interlocutor who has helped me theorise this.

The idea of disaster preparedness in Japan is about repurposing everyday objects and relationships. I feel like there’s something akin to the idea of patchwork there as well. Because it’s about what Gökçe was saying. There’s a kind of repair, maintenance, patching, and reincorporating things that are supposed to be waste into your life.

———— Kat. Can you talk about the relevancy, if at all, of the timing of the project around the Covid-19 pandemic?

Gökçe: I think one reason why it resonated with so many people was because we all were in the middle of that difficult care work that we were trying to all practice, either by actively taking care of sick people or by staying away from our friends and loved ones or trying to be good citizens in our communities in one way or another. I think that practice, which was actually quite challenging for many of us, was also showing the difficult face of care work to all of us. And so, even though the project is not necessarily related to the pandemic, I think the pandemic allowed for some of these ideas to be made very explicit and undeniable. Beckie: Yeah, I thought that was really interesting. I was thinking of Arundhati Roy’s (2020) article where she writes about the pandemic as a portal and there's a choice or a decision to make about what kinds of worlds we want to create, and she talks about dragging the old world and all the baggage with us or stepping lightly into this other world. Do you have anything to say about that in relation to patchwork ethnography? And, thinking a bit about the focus of this special issue on futures, how might patchwork be creating new kinds of feminist, queer, decolonial, anti-racist futures?

Gökçe: I think one of the interventions that was important about patchwork and that hopefully will change the way in which we think about ethnographic practice in the long term is focusing on the positionality of the ethnographer as a factor for thinking about how we design our research projects. As we published in the manifesto, so much of ethnographic innovation has focused on the lives of our research subjects, and so I think it was important for us to look at how much anthropology has changed and how much what an anthropologist looks like has transformed over the last decades.

Does that impact the way in which ethnographic practice happens?

Ethnographers asked that question specifically in relationship to communities, like the native ethnographer versus the non-native ethnographer, etc. But to ask that question more holistically, I think, was an important push and hopefully, that will be something that we think about more broadly in an expansive way as the patchwork grows over the coming years.

Chika: Yeah, I think the pandemic was a blessing and a curse in the sense that, you know, obviously it really resonated with people because everybody was going through this experience of not being able to do extended fieldwork and I think that was good. Because the pandemic made it so that everybody, even those who thought they were not torn by different responsibilities, had to come to terms with competing demands. Everybody had to now think about that. So, I think it really centred the people who are often marginalised in research. It became everyone's condition. The question of care work and childcare was so central in the pandemic. I think that it brought that to the foreground of patchwork ethnography. We want to expand the idea of the conditions that generate that condition. So yeah, I think that might be one of the things that we're trying to sort of rebalance with patchwork.

———- Kat: Can we talk more about the positionality of the ethnographer? When undertaking ethnography, no one is ever going to have the same experience, even if they research the same place at the same time. How do you think Patchwork Ethnography is shaping or challenging those kinds of core ideas of ethnographic practice?

Chika: I think for me, the difference with the reflexive form of subjectivity of the ethnographer discussion is the detail of what that implies because it's not just about saying, you know, I'm a Japanese middle-class woman. And people see me in a particular way in the field or something, but it's about, okay, what are the different responsibilities. As Gökçe was saying, what's the kind of labour of care and responsibility in my professional and personal relationships that I'm bringing to the field? We’re trying to really flesh that out. And one of the things that I think we can explore further in the future is the writing.

How does patchwork ethnography change the way that we write ethnography?

And how are details of life and work interlinked?

I think that’s different from just having a statement saying, ‘I'm an Asian feminist’, or you know that kind of positionality statement. I think, despite all of the things that anthropologists and ethnographers have talked about, I feel like, in our training, at least, which is now maybe dated, but we were never really pushed to think about, okay, what does that actually mean in the day to day? Okay, I'm Japanese, you know, and my parents are from Japan and all of that. But I never had the space to reflect on what it means that I'm going to be living with my parents, you know, in a particular household, and all of those details of what that actually means for knowledge production. Kat: And also, how it changes, right? Over the course of any ethnographic research project, life happens, and the people you're working with, living with, and caring for change. Very rarely do you find a researcher or their research project ending in the same way they began.

Chika: A reviewer in a recent article said that you don't need to give us all the details of the life experience that stopped you from doing research. That's not relevant to the research, so take that out. No! Keeping it in is the whole point of a seamful approach to ethnographic writing.

Gökçe: I want to echo the transformation. Your status as a middle-class woman and ethnographer might not change that much through the course of your research. But one of the things I've noticed, for instance, is how, as I age, I have different kinds of relationships with my research subjects. When I was a PhD student, people wanted to sit me down, tell me things, and instruct me on their work. And now that I'm no longer a student, there is a different kind of perception. I'm just using that as an example to unpack how the positionality statement might not necessarily give us enough of a sense of the dynamics that we experience in the field.

I'm doing research on a floating power plant in Ghana. And over the years, I've become friends with certain people in the energy sector there. And now, when I show up, I'm perceived as those people's friend. So now I'm situated in a particular zone in that energy world, which maybe – I'm not saying it overrides all my other qualities – but it gives you a different kind of positionality. And that, again, shapes the way in which you do research because you have to navigate that social landscape based on the kinds of intimacies that you developed in that landscape.

I think there's a lot to say about the ways in which we review the positionality statement almost as a release. Like, okay, let's put this here. And now that it's there, I can do whatever I want. But weaving that into how we write and trying to explain how that actually affected our research, I think it takes a lot of thinking and a lot of effort on the part of the ethnographer. It doesn't feel, to me, like second nature to try to write this way or to try to say these are the reasons why I made these decisions because we haven't. That's not the genre. So, it's calling for a sort of transformation in the genre, which is hard. I'm finding it hard to produce for myself. Beckie: That makes a lot of sense. One of the things Kat and I are interested in is the question of not continually clearing up the messiness of research. How do you write about that? How do you teach it? How can you think of that as part of a rigorous research practice and process? I'm supervising undergraduate dissertation students at the moment, and I keep saying to them, you don't know what you're going to find out and that's okay and it is messy and it will change and that's the process of doing research. There's one thing about how you kind of tell people about that but there's another in terms of what genres we can tell those stories through.

Kat: It makes me think of all the micro decisions that we make when we are sewing in my research studio. Nothing prepares you for that even when you have a plan at the beginning. I can't just give a plan to people or even to myself and say, “Well, that's it. We don't have to think about this anymore”. There are constant decisions, mistakes, surprises, tangents and things happening all the way along. And the end result might be somewhere in the realm of what we originally planned to do, or it has turned into something else entirely. We do ethnographic research throughout our reconstructions to document and reflect on the process. So, the textures and layers and the ways in which things get stitched together, happens literally for me. This is both the materiality of my practice and my thinking. So, patchwork is a multi-layered concept in my work.

Chika: And do you think the final product reflects the messiness and the contingency of the process? Or does it tend to kind of hide, or do you have to make an extra effort to make that come through? Kat: It depends on how you look at it, because on one side, like a patchwork, the surface of a garment is quite smooth. And you look on the back of it and you can see all the seams, the markings, multiple fixings, maybe tracings of unpicking, mending, knots and things like that (Figure 4). And often I find that side more interesting, especially in historic garments when you try and learn about the life of the garment and its wearers. I try to turn things around, so there's never one surface. It's about constantly looking at multiple perspectives on things. Figure 4. Close up of messy underside of a patchwork.

Chika: That's really beautiful. I wonder if there's a way of expressing that in writing. I mean, maybe writing is too limiting? Showing messiness can also become performative. It's like, how do you write in a way that shows both sides? Because you are trying to create a surface that works as a narrative as well, right? I think for me, because I'm trying to write, it's one of the challenges, because everybody knows that practice is messy and ethnography is messy, and there's something kind of virtuous signalling about having done messy ethnography. But then, when people write about it, it ends up sounding like it was all thought out from the beginning. So how do you write it in a way that actually expresses that? Kat: Let's make that a question. How would you answer that?

Gökçe: Maybe the footnotes are the kinds of stitching you're talking about. That's what I was thinking, like long footnotes that are coupled with a sort of smooth text. There are many books that are written this way, but one that came to mind immediately is the novel, J.M Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year (2007). It's written in these two segments where there's one story that's actually happening at the top of the page and then a second story that's happening at the bottom, and you're getting a detailed understanding of how the first story happens in the second story. So, you know, people have done those kinds of formal experiments. Maybe patchwork calls for more. Beckie: It makes me think of inspiring examples of ethnographic writing over time. One is Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart's book, The Hundreds (2019) where they experiment with writing in a hundred words or the multiples of the hundred. I really like the writing experiments. The referencing and the indexing are different as well, because they reference the thoughts, the things and the moods that they were working with, as well as the academic references. And they ask other people - Fred Moten, Andrew Causey and C. Thresher, Susan Lepselter, Stephen Muecke - to index the book too, to provide different ways of making connections across the scenes.

———- Kat: Can you talk about the implications for Patchwork Ethnography in this rush to return to “normal” after the global pandemic, even though for many people and in many contexts, it is still very much present. What are the kinds of futures or hopes you have for Patchwork Ethnography?

Chika: I guess it might change, but I think one of our hopes is that it becomes a central way that ethnographic training happens. We created a syllabus, a course outline (https://www.patchworkethnography.com/syllabus_220510). It’s online on our website and on the Cultural Anthropology Fieldsights website. It’s to make sure that graduate students, before they go do fieldwork really consider who they are in the world. What are the multiple responsibilities that they're juggling and that they will be bringing with them to the field? Do they need to do long-term, extended, continuous fieldwork? I mean, we still believe in long-term engagements with the topic and people and sites, but we're just saying it doesn't have to happen in 12 consecutive months. So, would you need to think about that a little bit more? You know, even if you claim that you were in a field site for 18 months, what are the different responsibilities you juggled in being there? And I think by doing that, we can expand who can be a theorist and who can be an ethnographer, and you know, hopefully, that will become more normalised in some way.

Gökçe: We're also working on a textbook. So, we're trying to expand our syllabus project with more exercises and more reflection on what those exercises do and mean. Kirin Narayan’s (2012) Alive in the Writing has been an inspiration for us as we imagine the kind of textbook we’d like to put together. So, while we're exploring the project for ourselves, we're also using pedagogical tools to think about what it might mean for new ethnographers who are starting projects for the first time. So that's something that we want to be doing within the next year.

Chika: Alongside that, what would it take for funders and reviewers of funding to recognise patchwork methods as a legitimate way to approach a topic— might it mean instead of funding a two-year project, you fund a four-year project where fieldwork happens in spurts, for example. At the same time, it’s not about giving tools for institutions to say, oh, that means that you don't need a whole semester of sabbatical because you don't have to go away for a long period. We want to expand the kinds of research methods that are seen as legitimate.

———- Beckie: We know you have written about this, but can you talk a little more about how patchwork ethnography changes the relationship between home and field?

Gökçe: That's another transformative element for us. In the American Ethnologist (2024) piece, we expanded on this a little bit. In the class that I'm teaching here now on methods, I do this exercise, which is a part of the Patchwork Ethnography syllabus, where students take their research questions and then try to answer those research questions here in Houston, rather than the sites that they intended on exploring. So, they learn how to separate their objects of study from their objects of observation. In some cases, it works really well and leads to a practice where the students understand the globality of the kinds of research questions they're asking and also notice solidarities amongst different groups of people. So that's shifted the way in which they understand Houston as a home slash research site through the process. And then if they're doing research in the cities or the countries that they're from, again, there's a similar kind of shift happens there also, because then the home, the same kind of dynamic that they experience here in Houston translates to the kind of dynamic they're going to experience in their research sites. So yeah, I think that's been another way in which we try to sort of think about Patchwork. As Chika said before, as you're doing research, you're crafting that space as your home and bringing on all the responsibilities of home to your research site anyway. And so, what does it mean to sort of then turn your home into that research site? Kat: There's so much ethnographic literature on when to leave the field, to know when you've had enough and what do you do with those relationships once you come back. But when you are doing it all from home, it is different. During the pandemic when I was supervising students in lockdown, I could see their lives unfolding behind them in complicated ways. And they were talking about this, asking how to work with and around it. It's really rich, but also complicated and difficult in many ways.

Gökçe: Exactly. Exactly.

———- Beckie: Finally, I wondered whether you had anything to say about the relationship between emotional labour, invisible labour and care in terms of how people are doing ethnography now? Do we need to claim that and call it something rather than going with the more traditional idea of ethnography?

Gökçe: I think that’s one of the things that was really important to us. There are actually all these innovations happening in ethnographic practice, but if we paper over those then we’re actually losing a resource. I mean, if you want to think about it very pragmatically, we want to learn how other ethnographers are doing their research projects. We don’t want to just say, ‘Oh, I just showed up, and I just did it, and that was it … ’ We want to populate the details of how it’s done and how it’s done well. And we talk about care work in relationship to the communities we research with. So, maybe exposing the seams of our practice allows us to develop and do that same kind of care work with our colleagues and to share the kind of challenges that we’re going through in an honest way so that we can find solutions to those challenges together collectively. So, it extends that attention in a productive way that allows us to think together about shared issues.

Chika: Gökçe grew up in Turkey. I’m from Japan. I sound American, but my whole family is in Japan. And I left for university when I was 18. For many years and for both of us, caring for people has always been a long-distance relationship. And relationships have always been patchwork, right? You can have a loving relationship with people, even if you’re not with them the whole time. Fieldwork ethnographers have done this for many years. They keep in touch with their interlocutors through letters at first and now with email and phones. So, the emotional labour of fieldwork has always been patchwork. And that’s something a peer reviewer of our American Ethnologist essay mentioned.

At first, we weren’t saying that everyone has to do patchwork. For some people, it’s better to stay in one field site for a long time, and patchwork is just one of many tools people can use. But one of the peer reviewers said I think you should say that everything is patchwork. That's what's really exciting about it. And we realised that’s actually true.

Everyone has always done patchwork. Even people who are in one place for a long time are never only doing research, right? They have other commitments. If they're there with their family or children, they're often spending time with their family without doing research . So, fieldwork always involves thinking of it that way, as a kind of emotional labour, of trying to maintain all these relationships across distance. It should be the way that we think about relationships, fieldwork or not. But it's also not pretty, and not necessarily easy.

Long-distance relationships are also not easy. The people we work with, our interlocutors, are also doing patchwork labour, even if it's not ethnography. I work with institutional actors like government actors or NGO workers. And obviously they're not always just doing that work. They're also juggling family responsibilities and other things that have nothing to do with my research. They're also in and out of what I'm observing. I don't know if it's emotional labour, but fieldwork also involves a sort of like emotional attunements to our interlocutors’ lives. Kat: Everything's patchwork!

Everyone: Everything’s patchwork!

————– The changing light quality in the room of each of the onscreen quadrants of our digital meeting platform tells tales on our personal energy levels. The sun is rising on one and dropping on others. Ceiling office lights shine brightly while a home lamp casts a softer warmer glow. While we could talk for much longer, the many pieces of our personal patchworks are never far away; kids that need attention, meals to prepare, emails to write, conversations to be had with partners and friends and many other things on to-do lists in and outside the working day. We start to wrap up the conversation, even though there are clearly many new threads emerging that could be followed and woven into new textures and patterns.

————–

How do we wrap up a patchwork conversation like this? We wondered about it at the end of the initial meeting and have reflected on it since. The reality of ethnographic research is that fieldwork in all its wonderful constellations is difficult to conclude. Experiences and relationships forged in and around the field indelibly shape not only the research, but researchers’ lives long afterwards. And many return to these communities, places and ideas, maintaining connections in some form throughout their lives. In similar ways, patchwork in a crafting sense is made up of multiple pieces, often cast off from other projects, salvaged, collected, patterned together, and laboriously hand-worked into new forms. One side is smooth and neat while the other is structured with edges and seams. It seems fitting perhaps, that we resist a neat conclusion about a discussion of patchwork and ethnography. And in the spirit of feminist practices, being unfinished and holding things open is itself a deliberate and political decision to usher in other kinds of world-making possibilities.

What we have attempted to do in this article is render visible some of Günel and Watanabe’s ideas around ‘seamfulness’ of individual experiences and collective thinking around patchwork ethnography. We have stitched together our interview transcript with fieldnotes, images, references and reflections that emerged at different times and by different authors in and around our conversation. We maintained the question-and-answer format, for the liveliness of the conversation, even swapping on occasion the roles of interviewers and interviewees. In a small way, these insertions and additions bear witness to the textures of talking. Not only did they take place in our interaction, but they are essential pieces that enabled our collective patchwork to emerge. As Günel and Watanabe argue ‘a seam-full engagement with knowledge production’ is one that ‘foregrounds the seams in our work, the moves of contextualization/ decontextualization, the indeterminacies between “data” and daily life, the movement between field sites(s) and home, and the various editorial decisions ethnographers make as they refine their stories’ (2024, 131). This has been an experiment in bringing research practices closer, to entangle and patchwork them into the conversation. It’s a bit fragmented, messy and unfinished. But this is perhaps the point. Patchwork ethnography is not limited or contained to a single definition, application or experience. It might in fact be everywhere!

Acknowledgements

Kat and Beckie thank Chika and Gökçe for their openness to this experiment and the editors and designers of Australian Feminist Studies for working with us all on this.

Gökçe Günel is Associate Professor in Anthropology at Rice University. Her latest book, Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi (Duke University Press, 2019), focuses on the construction of renewable energy and clean technology infrastructures in the United Arab Emirates, more specifically concentrating on the Masdar City project. She co-leads Patchwork Ethnography.

Chika Watanabe is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. She is the author of Becoming One: Religion, Development, and Environmentalism in a Japanese NGO in Myanmar. Her current book manuscript, tentatively entitled Making Survival Possible: Disaster Preparedness through Play in Japan and Chile, examines how playful methods of preparedness such as the use of games orient people toward the future based on what she calls a logic of fragility. She co-leads Patchwork Ethnography.

Kat Jungnickel is a Professor in the Sociology Department, co-director of Methods Lab and PI on the European Research Council–funded project Politics of Patents: Reimagining Citizenship via Clothing Inventions 1820–2020 at Goldsmiths, University of London. Recent publications include How to do social research with …  (edited with Rebecca Coleman and Nirmal Puwar, 2024, Goldsmiths Press), (ed) Transmissions: Critical tactics for making and communicating research (2020, MIT Press).

Rebecca Coleman is a Professor in the Bristol Digital Futures Institute (BDFI) and School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS), University of Bristol. She currently Researcher in Residence at Knowle West Media Centre (KWMC) where she collaborates on community tech, arts-led methods and digital futures projects. Recent publications include How to do social research with …  (edited with Kat Jungnickel and Nirmal Puwar, 2024, Goldsmiths Press) and Glitterworlds: The Future Politics of a Ubiquitous Thing (2020, Goldsmiths Press).

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
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