Elisa Lanari

Organizers: Elisa Lanari, Andie Thompson, Magdalena Suerbaum. Anthropologists have long been interested in the methodological and ethical implications of ‘accompanied fieldwork’. Critical of the ‘lone hero’ model of fieldwork, feminist anthropologists have blurred the boundaries between fieldwork and care work, showing how familial entanglements shape – and strengthen – ethnographic possibilities. While ‘patchwork’ ethnography is increasingly recognised as the new normal, work that considers the researcher’s own kinship entanglements as a source of knowledge and theory-building remains scarce or relegated to the margins of our discipline and monographs. Our proposed workshop argues for a rethinking of ethnography as accompanied through all its stages – from choosing a research topic to fieldwork, writing and publishing. Moving beyond Western heteronormative tropes of accompanied research, we interpret kinship entanglements expansively, encompassing not only caring responsibilities for children, but also other human and extra-human care relationships. The workshop draws on multimodal methods and contributions from Black, indigenous and Chicanx feminist scholars, critical kinship and dis/ability studies to create a space where experiences of being accompanied, with their unique affordances and temporalities, are integrated into the ethnographic endeavour. Participants will be invited to engage in multimodal sessions experimenting with approaches such as body maps and zine-making to reflect on experiences of accompanied knowledge production.