Patchwork ethnography helps us think about fieldwork not in terms of mere productivity but also for “generating the conditions and exchanges that are meaningful for us.”
Sarah Muir
04 June 2021
Published: 23 November 2021
Image by Sarah Muir.
During the pandemic, Sarah Muir granted herself and her students more grace and generosity when it came to making deadlines and completing work. A feminist critical stance on labor became increasingly articulable in professional spaces in ways that it hadn’t been before. Being explicit about this critique remains crucial so this space doesn’t disappear again, especially amid institutions now pushing for a return to “normalcy.” The Patchwork Ethnography manifesto, being citable and in print, has an authoritative logic that helps to this end. Yet, at the same time, throughout all of this it remained important for Sarah to keep reading and doing things. This wasn’t for the sake of productivity, but for the part of her for which this is meaningful. For example, collaborative relations, especially for graduate students, are what often make academia not just survivable but joyful. Nonetheless, sometimes these things that are most meaningful for us, like collaboration, aren’t what are meaningful in the context of the job market. Patchwork ethnography also addresses this, challenging hegemonic models of the lone researcher. While this continues to be hard to disrupt, especially at the dissertation level, reading the Patchwork Ethnography Manifesto early in the semester with her students still opened up questions about research conventions. Patchwork thinking challenges a “deficit model” of alternative ethnographic practices (in which contingencies or Plan B’s are seen as lesser versions of some original project), instead valuing research designs that are more flexible, malleable, and responsive to different kinds of research, writing, and collaborative conditions.
Sarah Muir is Assistant Professor at City College of New York. smuir[at]ccny.cuny.edu