Making (Slowly) as Method: Piecing, Stitching and Steeping Metaphors for Multiple Methodologies

Abstract

How and what do we make through method? This paper imagines the processes of designing and carrying out socio-environmental research through the lens of a slow, creative craft form: sewing a patchworked piece from hand-dyed fabric samples. In doing so, it contributes to thinking about how methodologies are pieced and stitched together from multiple parts. Based on early findings from an extended research project exploring the practice of natural textile dyeing in the UK, I offer a range of textile processes for thinking through the creative dimensions of the doing of methodological work. The quilt-like piece I am attempting to make from plant-dyed fabric is at once the object, objective, and method in this study. I draw on auto-ethnographic reflections on my attempts to begin learning natural dyeing and sewing skills, suggesting piecing , stitching, and steeping may be useful, tactile metaphors for thinking through the early, often messy and uncertain stages of multi-sited and multi-method qualitative research. As such, I build on and extend recent discussions about ‘patchwork ethnography’, an approach recognising that the realities of ethnographic research in practice are often fragmented, non-linear, and intricately shaped by researchers’ everyday lives and commitments. The paper also offers insight into the potentials and pitfalls of intentionally ‘slow’ scholarship that aims to disrupt the urgent temporalities of research projects as they are often imagined.