“There’s the assumption that patching things together is generative, and it can be, but it can also be destabilizing.”
Jessica Caporusso
04 June 2021
Published: 23 November 2021
Image by Jessica Caporusso.
Patchiness has been not only method but object of research itself in Jessica Caporusso’s work on sustainable development projects in Mauritius. Early on, the conditions of possibility for her research were structured by her scientist- and engineer-interlocutors’ experiences with research theft in the sugarcane industry. Certain spaces were harder for her to access because of this, but it also attuned her to how patchiness characterized the knowledge production practices she was studying in other ways too. Knowledge production was entangled with whisper networks. Claims of and about research theft often could not be explicitly said due to the enduring colonial relations that structured such theft. Her engineering interlocutors taught their students how to manage research theft and guard against it in the first place, leading to a cobbling together of principles and practices that constituted alternative scientific methods and ways of thinking. Yet in addition to how her interlocutors patched together these techniques of knowledge production, she recognized the continuing patchy imperialisms that were manifesting as this very research theft. And this was amid her own patchwork ethnographic practices of weaving personal affordances and constraints with research interests. Different patchworks were anti-colonial, imperial, and ethnographic, all at once. There is no inherent moralism of patchwork. Patchwork, by its nature, is vulnerable to rupture and change, for better or for worse. What seems key, as put forward in the Patchwork Ethnography manifesto, is un-black-boxing the patchwork, showing the seams. This is how patchwork isn’t romanticized as method, ethnographic or anti-imperial or otherwise--patchwork ethnography is about making these seams explicit regardless of whom they benefit.
Jessica Caporusso is a PhD Candidate at York University. jcapo[at]yorku.ca / @jesscapo