“Recently, I have felt like maybe we should leave behind the field and home binary altogether.”
Cristina Moreno Lozano
28 May 2021
Published: 13 May 2021
Image by Victor on Upsplash.
Cristina Moreno Lozano’s home is her field, geographically speaking. She’s from Spain and is researching resistant infections and antibiotic control interventions in Spain, while doing a PhD as a part-time student in the UK. She points to discussions and practices in the Latin American and Spanish anthropological traditions of carrying out fieldwork reflexively “at home,” being a “native anthropologist,” or being a “citizen ethnographer” (in the work of Susana Narotzky, Rosana Guber, and Myriam Gimeno, among many others) as best capturing her approach to fieldwork. Her status as part-time researcher defines when she can travel (back home) and the conditions of this ethnographic inquiry, and also how she understands the field.
While developing a pandemic “contingency” plan for her project last summer, patchwork ethnography spoke to her. Her new plan was indeed more than simply a contingency plan, a Plan B. As someone who researches infectious diseases themselves, COVID-19 was not merely an externality introducing new challenges. Her methodological approach has always had to grapple with risk of infection and negotiating access to spaces like hospitals. What could be seen as constraints and limitations have instead shaped a different kind of approach to contemporary hospital ethnography. She values contingencies as actually constitutive of knowledge production and the field, and wonders if patchwork ethnography is a possible way forward.
Cristina Moreno Lozano is a PhD Candidate at the University of Edinburgh. cristina.moreno[at]ed.ac.uk / @crinamoreno