Composite ethnography: Collective encounters with emergent objects in the anthropocene

This paper introduces a methodological approach we call “composite ethnography,” a practice of lab-based qualitative research that focuses on collaboration, materiality and multiplicity. Drawing on a series of experiments running a collaborative project on urban waterways with graduate students, we argue that composite ethnography offers a way to think about the emergent research objects associated with what is increasingly referred to as the “Anthropocene,” while also addressing some longstanding problems of ethnographic method. Loosely based in the ontological openness of STS, the method offers an open-ended attunement to emergent objects, and invites the formation of new relations. By building methods around trust in one’s peers, we suggest that composite ethnography is a way to tackle four long-standing issues in ethnographic research around temporality, disqualification, collaboration and form.