Gökçe Günel

Soon after G’k’e G’nel, Saiba Varma, and Chika Watanabe received a Wenner Gren Workshop award (‘Patchwork Ethnography: Attending to the Personal in Research Methods,’ Gr. CONF-840), they wrote a short piece, ‘A Manifesto for Patchwork Ethnography,’ intending it as an introductory text for workshop participants. However, the COVID-19 lockdown incentivized the authors to share the manifesto with a larger community. On June 9th 2020, the authors published their manifesto on the Cultural Anthropology website. In the days following publication, they received extensive attention from ethnographers across the world. For instance, colleagues in Indonesia translated the text into Indonesian. Beyond anthropology, colleagues in history, architecture, media studies, political science and medieval studies, reached out to share personal difficulties and accounts of marginalization within the discipline and expressed a desire to participate in a patchwork ethnography collective. Faculty, students, and lecturers in precarioius conditions shared what the concept has done for them and expressed a desire to discuss its implications for future anthropological research in a context beyond a limited workshop whose participants have already been selected. Several volunteered their labor in assembling what patchwork ethnography might mean going forward. We are applying for a webinar grant because we feel a sense of responsibility to make space for a broad and inclusive conversation on patchwork ethnography.