A Fieldwork Story Told Through Knitting

Abstract

During a multi-sited ethnographic research on responses towards the presence of refugees from abroad in Indonesia, I brought along my knitting needles and five colours of yarn. Knitting was an effective outlet to manage the emotions and anxieties of fieldwork. The chapter documents my fieldwork experiences through a knitting project that would use colours to “code” my feelings on a weekly basis. The chapter explores how arts and crafts are used as metaphors to capture the intuitive and emotional dimensions of academia that are often missing from research methodology teaching. The coloured yarns have now been knitted into a striped cloth “scarf” representing the emotional labour of doing research that is partial to fieldwork but often excluded from its retelling.