Title: Patchwork ethnography
Domain: philosophy

Question: How patchwork ethnography, as a methodology, enables ethnographers conduct fieldwork amid intersecting personal and professional responsibilities, and unlocks anthropology’s potential to further expand what theory means and who can be considered a theorist?

Background: 1.Neoliberal university labor conditions, expectations of work-life balance, environmental concerns, and feminist and decolonial critiques have demanded a rethinking of fieldwork as a process that entails spending a year or longer in a faraway place. | 2.Many ethnographers have already been recombining “home” and “field” for a long time. But these innovations have remained black boxed. | 3.Anthropologists have challenged various things, including assumptions about the fixity of “the field”;separations between “field” and “home”; the difficult negotiations of the anthropologist as insider/outsider ; the gendered (masculinist) assumptions of the always available and up-foranything fieldworker ; and the presumption that the ethnographer can or even should be a detached observer. | 4.Critical conversations on methodology have interrogated the assumption that long-term continuous fieldwork is necessary or appropriate for all projects.

Definitions: 1.Patchwork ethnography: A methodological approach in anthropology and related disciplines that adapts traditional ethnographic fieldwork to the realities of contemporary academic and personal life. It involves conducting short-term, multi-sited, or intermittent field visits that are "patched together" over time, rather than relying on a single, extended period of immersion in the field. 2. Feminist and queer methodologies: Research approaches that critically engage with issues of gender, sexuality, and power to challenge dominant norms and inequalities in knowledge production. 3.Field methdology:The systematic approaches and techniques used by researchers—especially in disciplines like anthropology, sociology, and human geography—to collect data through direct engagement with people, places, and social practices in their natural settings.

Methodology: 1.Review the tradition in anthropology that has persistently questioned the discipline’s truisms, and interrogate the assumption that long-term continuous fieldwork is necessary or appropriate for all projects. 2.Questions the assumption of a separation between ethnographic research and 'domestic labor' by drawing on feminist and queer methodologies. 3.Advocates to embrace the entanglements of personal and professional relations that come from who we are in the world by emphasizing enthnographer is a relational subject, and its scholarly endeavors a product of relations and dialogues with others.

Answer: Patchwork ethnography | 1.Patchwork ethnography | Background: Researchers today face multiple demands on their time, demanding a rethinking of fieldwork as a process that entails spending a year or longer in a faraway place. | Patchwork enthnography ia s solution: Patchwork enthnography calls for a "seam-full" engagement with knowledge production, that is, an engagement that foregrounds the seams in our work, the moves of contextualization/decontextualization, the indeterminacies between "data" and daily life, the movement between field site(s) and home, and the various editorial decisions ethnographers make as they refine their stories. | 2.Patchwork ethnography builds on a tradition in anthropology that has persistently questioned the discipline's truisms. | Patchwork ethnography challenges assumptions about the fixity of "the field" ; separations between "field" and "home"; the difficult negotiations of the anthropologist as insider/outsider; the gendered (masculinist) assumptions of the always available and up-for-anything fieldworker; and the presumption that the ethnographer can or even should be a detached observer. | Patchwork ethnography upends another truism of anthropological research to highlight that some of the justifications for our research design might be based not on the research topic or subjects, but on the personal circumstances of intersecting responsibilities and choices, as well as on the structural conditions of academic labor. | Danilyn Rutherford pointed that if we distinguish "objects of observation" (the field site) from "objects of study" (the research questions), researchers might be able to redesign their fieldwork around the same world phenomenon but in a different, more accessible locale under the pandemic. | Some patchwork ethnographers question the separation of "field" from "home" by positing that switching from one to the other might be a difference in attention and not physical location. | 3.Feminist and queer methodologies support patchwork enthnography | Feminist and queer methodologies question why ethnographic research and "domestic labor" are separated in actual fieldwork experiences. | Sara Ahmed points to the misguided assumption that knowledge production happens demarcated from personal lives and domestic spheres. | Chika and Gökçe's parallel experiences of the erasures of the home-field continuum allow us to perceive how difficult it was to maintain that home and field division, yet how unthinkable it had been for us to write or theorize in ways that brought the two together. | Feminist scholarship reveals the closet the fact that researchers adapt fieldwork methods around the responsibilities, commitments, and expectations that come from who we are in the world. | Conclusion: Feminist and queer methodologies support patchwork enthnography, and patchwork enthnography is a call for being honest about how the personal and the professional, the "domestic" and the academic, intersect and inform each other in all knowledge production. | 4.The fact that the enthnographer is a relational subject supports patchwork enthnography | Anthropologist' scholarly endeavors are always a product of relations and dialogues with others. | Indigenous anthropologists have shown, the impossibility of separating personal and professional relations enables radical reformulations of anthropological theorizing, wherein Indigenous theories provincialize Euro-American thought. | Conclusion: Embracing the entanglements of personal and professional relations that come from who we are in the world can profoundly change what anthropological theory means, and this aligns with the call for patchwork ethnography. | 5.The structural constraints in the neoliberal university calls for patchwork enthnography | Anthropologists and other researchers have begun to highlight the hardships of current academic labor conditions. First, scholars have problematized the neoliberalization of universities in the US, Europe, and elsewhere, in which the precaritization of academic work, the quantitative monitoring of research performance, and rising overwork under austerity measures are pushing researchers into impossible situations, rendering long stretches of fieldwork unfeasible. Second, anthropologists have recently begun to publish accounts of fieldwork that recognize the embodied aspects of ethnography, which often excludes many people from practicing it. Third, researchers have illuminated how caring responsibilities and family-career balance intersect with fieldwork and professional commitments. | Conclusion: Less-than-ideal labor conditions call for the patchwork ethnography. | | Conclusion: It is necessary to develop the concept of "patchwork ethnography" to emphasize how ethnographers carry out fieldwork while managing overlapping personal and professional responsibilities.

Checklist: 1. Does the answer include perspectives discussing patchwork ethnography? | 2. Does the answer include the perspective that patchwork ethnography builds on a tradition in anthropology that has persistently questioned the discipline's truisms? | 3. Does the answer include the perspective that feminist and queer methodologies challenge the separation of domestic labor and fieldwork? | 4. Does the answer include the perspective that patchwork ethnography is a result of less-than-ideal labor conditions?