Reflections on patchwork ethnography and activist scholarship: The role of methods in witnessing and participating in worldmaking at the margins of the EU

Abstract

The way we do research can and does affect how we think about, engage with, and explore approaches to worldmaking and marginality. Approaches to research play a role in what we recognize and witness and how we influence and construct the worlds we engage with. Building on the work of scholars such as King and Picozza, I ask what role there is for activist scholarship in thinking about questions of worldmaking in spaces and places of marginality. Specifically, I ask how taking an activist approach to our scholarship can facilitate deeper engagements with alternative forms of worldmaking that take place in spaces and places of displacement support. I argue for a research approach grounded in activist scholarship focused on long-term interventions best understood as “patchwork ethnography,” focused on relationship building, reflexivity, and politically driven research. I draw on vignettes and research diaries to explore the relationship between activism and worldmaking to support two arguments. Firstly, researchers themselves can participate in forms of worldmaking when working with communities to develop and enact projects. Secondly, that participation of this sort enables a recognition of different approaches to building collective worlds that may be missed through relying on less embedded research methods.