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Last week, we had our March reading group on the topic of Patchwork Ethnography.

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On the reading list for this session were the paper, “Patchwork Ethnography” by Gökçe Günel and Chika Watanabe and “Selfies and Self-Fictions, Calibrating Co-presence in and of ‘the Field’” by Liana Chua. In their paper, Günel and Watanabe (2024) focus on the concept of patchwork ethnography and bring the metaphor of a seam-full patchwork to illustrate how ethnographers carry out their field work while also navigating their personal and professional commitments.  Further, the paper brings insights from feminist and queer methodologies and calls for a broader perception of the ethnographer as a relational subject.

Liana Chua’s (2021) paper is closely connected to the topic of patchwork ethnography but concentrates on the digital aspect of ethnography during the rise in social media which has made drawing the boundary between the research and personal life more challenging.

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These two papers motivated an insightful discussion on the appropriateness of “patchwork ethnography” as a concept in our uncertain times, separation between the “field” and “home”, and how we might think about patchwork ethnography beyond fieldwork, in terms of our analysis, writing and multimodal engagements. We were also joined by colleagues from FASoS who enriched the discussion by bringing in their perspectives and personal experiencesof patchwork ethnography. I

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In April, we have our third reading group on the topic of Tourism: Encounters and (Im)Mobilities. Follow along on this website for future project updates and reading group recaps!