Patchwork Ethnography

Offers an accessible new way to think critically and transparently about how researchers, especially those doing ethnographic work, can balance their personal commitments with long-term research.

For ethnographers, spending a year or longer in a faraway place conducting fieldwork is increasingly untenable amid life responsibilities, rising workloads, and constraints imposed by disability, precarity, and geopolitical factors. If ethnographic methods are to remain viable and broadly relevant for a diverse group of people in anthropology and beyond, Gökçe Günel and Chika Watanabe argue, we need to examine how our personal and professional lives intersect and shape one another.

In Patchwork Ethnography, Günel and Watanabe take seriously the conditions that render long-term fieldwork difficult for so many. Without being prescriptive, the book offers concrete ways for scholars to unpack competing commitments and make the attendant challenges more manageable. Blending theoretical analysis with practical exercises, the authors guide readers to rethink the relationship between their personal lives and their scholarship. Ultimately, they point to ways to transform limitations into catalysts for fresh insights. By highlighting how shifting labor and living conditions profoundly alter knowledge production, Patchwork Ethnography calls for a paradigm shift in ethnographic research.