Family, failure and fatigue in the field A patchwork of omissions
Main Article Content
Keywords
Family, Burnout, Fieldwork, Academic writing
Abstract
Many feminist scholars have experienced receiving critique for what are claimed to be overly narrative, emotional, or insufficiently scholarly pieces of writing. This piece speaks to this experience. The text was originally read as a presentation in a webinar on 'Patchwork Ethnography'. In resisting the coerciveness of dominant academic rhetorical codes, the paper calls for researchers to be more transparent about the devastating effects of patriarchy and neoliberal academia on their personal and professional lives. The choices we make about what and how we research; what and where we publish; and how we write; can and should contribute to countering those effects, and envisioning and enacting a world where being an academic doesn't hurt.
Article Metrics Graph
References
Alava, Henni. Christianity, Politics and the Afterlives of War in Uganda. “There Is Confusion.” New Directions in the Anthropology of Christianity. Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.
Cerwonka, Allaine, and Liisa H. Malkki. Improvising Theory : Process and Temporality in Ethnographic Fieldwork. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Günel, Gökçe, Saiba Varma, and Chika Watanabe. “A Manifesto for Patchwork Ethnography.” Society for Cultural Anthropology, 2020. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/a-manifesto-for-patchwork-ethnography.
Jääskeläinen Pauliina and Jenny Helin, “Writing Embodied Generosity,” Gender, Work & Organization 28, no. 4 (2021): 1398–1412, https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12650.
Page, Tiffany. “Vulnerable Writing as a Feminist Methodological Practice.” Feminist Review 115, no. 1 (March 1, 2017): 13–29. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41305-017-0028-0.
Panel 1: Familial Entanglements, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvLuWQVuEWA.
Patchwork Ethnography. “Patchwork Ethnography.” Patchwork Ethnography, 2021. https://www.patchworkethnography.com.
Pullen, Alison. “Writing as Labiaplasty,” Organization 25, no.1 (2018): 125, https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508417735537.
Yates-Doerr, Emily. "Antihero Care: On Fieldwork and Anthropology", Anthropology and Humanism 45, no. 2 (2020): 233-244. https://doi.org/10.1111/anhu.12300.