Patchwork ethnography reflects “a fairer landscape of who is able to do what kind of fieldwork.”
Ana Ivasiuc
31 May 2021
Published: 08 December 2021
Image conceived by Jon Ardern, Anab Jain, and Paul Graham; designed and produced by Superflux;
and with illustrations by Amélie Barnathan.
While researching the securitization of Roma in Italy, Ana Ivasiuc encountered fieldwork challenges such as interlocutors withdrawing access due to her critical stance. But her fieldwork challenges also extended far beyond the field itself, to her family and care relations back home. She realized she couldn’t afford fieldwork in the classical way we know it, as a parent of young children (and later as a single parent), and also an immigrant without an extensive social network to draw on for care work. The sites and temporalities of her fieldwork were thus shaped by what was “in” the field as much as what was “outside” it. For her, patchwork ethnography has the potential to disrupt the hierarchies in anthropology around gender, age, immigration status, race, marital status, and funding–and the ways these shape how fieldwork is ideally imagined and carried out in practice. Patchwork makes space for new forms of collaboration and thinking about fieldwork. Still, patchwork ethnography is not merely about celebrating creativity amid constraint. Optimism around expanded and more inclusive frameworks of ethnography still feels partly cruel to Ana in Berlant’s sense of the word, but patchwork ethnography does open up the possibility of questioning these external and internalized pressures regarding fieldwork. It is about dissolving the constraints posed by the way fieldwork is prescribed: in lengthy uninterrupted periods of time, where the ethnographer becomes an individual stripped of the thickness of their own social relationships, who can afford to drop care responsibilities back home and become a neutral, care-less tool for science. Such imaginaries of ethnographic fieldwork are commensurate with the now outdated "view from nowhere," where the researcher's social embeddedness is of no consequence to the knowledge he (more often than not) produces. Producing situated knowledge also means taking into account the social situatedness of the ethnographer outside of fieldwork, and expanding the range of ethnographic fieldwork possibilities. Patchwork ethnography initiates a long overdue conversation about inclusivity and reflexivity.
Ana Ivasiuc is a Lecturer in the Anthropology of Crime and Security at Maynooth University, Ireland. ana.ivasiuc[at]mu.ie