We need to patchwork the “being here” part as much as the “being there” part.
Renata Albuquerque
20 May 2022
Published: 11 July 2022
Image by Chicome Itzcuintli Amatlapalli and reproduced here with permission.
Since becoming a mother, Renata Alburquerque feels she is doing bad anthropology. With teaching-intensive university positions and care work, how does one find time to write, or to think, or to do research, or to participate in reading groups that meet weekly in the evenings? More than merely self-consciousness about her own situation, the feeling is rooted in the manifestation of such constraints in academic job market competitiveness. It’s unfair that in job applications, where points are assigned per publication, it’s not her intellectual work being measured but simply her time. How can she compete for a position if the evaluation of her CV does not consider that in the past five years she had two babies, breastfed them, attended to their needs day and night, and scheduled her work around their needs and cries? How does one conduct productive research under these conditions, with many hours a week dedicated to unpaid reproductive work? Moreover, the pandemic has affected research mothers' work conditions in many ways too. There is not enough time to fulfill unrealistic expectations for intellectual production, expectations that systematically disregard the multiple personal and professional commitments anthropologists have. The parameters for “good” anthropology continue to exclude care work and the patchwork dynamics this imposes on research. Colleagues can be supportive of her yet still also effectively support the structures that give rise to these conditions.
More broadly, Brazil, where she lives, has seen attacks on university resources and funding in the past ten years. This has resulted in more unstable and fragmented work conditions and an increase in unpaid intellectual initiatives, especially outside of public universities, where the majority of research mothers are based. Why is the way we think about anthropological work and productivity not also changing along with the institutional and political context within which that work occurs? There are more and more conversations about patchwork-like fieldwork (which is accepted and even taken for granted in Brazil to begin with), but less discussed is the patchwork quality of many anthropologists’ everyday lives. Patchwork is what she’s doing, but academic institutions–from study groups to universities and research foundations–still do not consider this as a valid way of doing intellectual work. Hence the feeling of not-good-enough anthropology. In other words, it’s easy for these challenges to seem individual and personal, but they’re not, and this is what Patchwork Ethnography is about.
Renata Albuquerque is mother of two and Assistant Professor at Faculdade Cásper Líbero.