“In stitching together the patches for ethnography, what do you do if the patches aren't quite there?”
Kim Fernandes
01 June 2021
Published: 10 November 2021
Image by Nadezhda Moryak.
As the pandemic wears on, Kim Fernandes grapples with a feeling of stuckness. There is this idea that you follow where the field takes you. Kim is following where the field is taking them and it’s to a lot of grief and heartbreak. As a disabled researcher based in India, amid overwhelming fear and concern about the pandemic, there is so much waiting. Crip time has helped them to think with this stuckness. We can recognize not doing anything or half-doing something in the field as care for self and others, but the stuckness still persists: does this come to be fieldwork? If the substance of the patches of ethnography is our interlocutors’ lives and our relations with them, what if right now much of that is mediated by fear and grief? Ethnography is not separate from care but caring for interlocutors means sometimes not talking to them. Given how the ethnographer makes the field, if the pandemic experience of waiting and uncertainty is the field experience for the ethnographer, how does this become fieldwork as well? How, too, do we get to a point of recognizing more care work as fieldwork, even as the nature of this care work shifts to waiting, holding back, grieving? This is incompatible with the fact that degrees have to be completed, dissertations have to be written, and fieldwork has to be wrapped up, all of which causes a deep stuckness. Patchwork ethnography can help us start to ask these questions of how fieldwork becomes about more than just doing, but also being.
Kim Fernandes is a PhD Candidate at the University of Pennsylvania.