Experiments in composite ethnography (I)
Introduction
BY SARAH YEMS
This is the first in a five-part series of posts reflecting on the Graduate Summer Institute in Mess and Methods, which was hosted by the Waterways Collective in 2025. The Institute was an intensive training in collaborative, multimodal ethnographic methods that took Montreal's rivers, shorelines, and water infrastructure as its object of research.
For many graduate students, the idea of working meaningfully across disciplinary boundaries to produce ethnographic research is enticing. And yet, many graduate courses aren’t designed with either true interdisciplinarity or research at the heart, leaving students’ academic goals unmet. Even when we start to break down disciplinary silos, administrative considerations such as grading conventions or course listings often force them back apart. Likewise, depending on one’s background, the PhD fieldwork might be the first piece of sustained research a student ever does, meaning students enter the field with little to no experience of the ethnographic method.
In this blog series, we describe and analyse a composite ethnography project run throughout 2025 that sought to address the problems of interdisciplinarity and of access to meaningful ethnographic experiences. The project underpinned the fieldwork that students conducted as part of the Mess and Method’s Graduate Summer Institute (referred to henceforth as the ‘Summer Institute’). Led by Kregg Hetherington, the Summer Institute was hosted at Concordia University’s Ethnography Lab in August 2025. It was held over two weeks; the first was seminar-based and hosted online. The second took place in Montreal and was comprised of structured physical encounters with the city’s waterways. This fieldwork was part of that second week.
This is the first in a series of posts authored by the Ethnography Lab’s Waterways Collective. The Waterways Collective is an interdisciplinary group of graduate students who research Montreal’s water and shorelines. The series itself is a continuation of our composite approach, which looks to hold space for objects and perspectives as multiple, without reconciling them. Writing it together has been fascinating as we confronted our conflicting memories of shared events. Each post is written from the perspective of individual group members, reflecting our efforts to compose together without necessarily resolving as one unified representation of what the work was or what it means. In this first post, I will outline the project itself, setting the scene for the posts that follow.
CE & The Graduate Summer Institute
At the Concordia Ethnography Lab, projects throughout the last several years have evolved into what we call ‘composite ethnography’ (Campos-Ortiz et al 2025; Hetherington 2025). The method is a way of approaching ethnography as a group endeavor that foregrounds the process or craft. Composite ethnography draws on foundational work in science and technology studies (STS) which recognises objects as ontologically plural and enacted through our encounters with them (Law 2004; Mol 2002). The ‘Composite Ethnography Protocol’ (Campos-Ortiz et al 2025) has six tongue-in-cheek ‘steps’ to follow for doing ethnography as a group:
(1) Choose an object and form a collective: Call a brainstorm to determine the ethnographic object. The brainstorm acts as a co-constitutive moment in which both the ethnographic object and collective are determined.
(2) Care for the collective and the object: This step is a moment to be intentional about how care will be enacted throughout the research process. It’s a moment for setting expectations and attuning to the group.
(3) Produce fragments: Members of the group decide which parts of the object they are most interested in and follow their curiosity to produce ethnographic fragments
(4) Do things together: A continual reminder to actively do things together into the process. Collective encounters are critical to building the group and the object. “It is through conversations, remarks, seeing others get interested in something we ignored or overlooked that our objects come alive and become complex” (Campos-Ortiz et al. 2025, 12)
(5) Assemble: Share your individual fragments and turn them into collective constructions.
(6) Compose! Decide your form - it could be an article but also consider formats like Zines or websites that allow for greater multiplicity - and compose your final object.
The steps of the protocol aren’t meant to be linear. Rather, some are enacted earlier and often in the process (see steps two and four), and it’s advised that step six is an ongoing consideration from about halfway through the project. The protocol aims to enact the multiplicity of objects throughout the process of creating ethnographic fragments. These fragments are assembled and finally composed in a final artefact that arises from the ethnographic object, but a final resolution isn’t forced. Rather, the artefact aims to hold the fragments together, separately.
In the 2024/2025 academic year, The Waterways Collective spent several months experimenting with what it meant to do CE at two different sites: Parc Dieppe and Verdun Beach. Following that experimentation, Kregg invited us to design a field workshop for the Summer Institute. The course was designed to be interdisciplinary and multimodal, with students coming from across anthropology, sociology, design, the arts, and many other disciplines. With the fieldwork component, we divided students into four groups and sent them to either the Verdun Beach or Parc Dieppe site to perform a rapid version of composite ethnography. They were invited to explore the multiplicity of their designated sites through the method and their collective interdisciplinary and multimodal ways of encountering research objects. In the Summer Institute’s conclusion, groups presented their in-progress research responses in whatever form they wished: through text, sculpture, film, poetry, and so on.
Over the next month, five members of the Waterways Collective - Angelica Pliego and Kregg Hetherington, Patrizio McLelland, Polina Shubina, and Annabel Durr - will share four blog posts on the project here. Taken together, these posts draw different perspectives on the work, but they also invite you to undertake your own composite ethnographic projects and learning experiences. In producing outputs beyond the individually authored textual monograph, our project challenges the convention of what anthropological research output should (or could?) be. Furthermore, it makes anthropology accessible to a broader audience and to build ties across university departments. At a time when our discipline is facing increasing pressures to prove its value to educational institutions, these sorts of interventions are a way to do so.
References
Ortiz, M. C., Pasborg, D., Olaya, C., Patino, C., Simon, B., & Hetherington, K. (2025, April 1). Protocol for a Composite Ethnography. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/tvwud
Hetherington, K. (2025). Composite ethnography: Collective encounters with emergent objects in the anthropocene. Ethnography, 0(0). https://doi-org.lib-ezproxy.concordia.ca/10.1177/14661381251348283
Law, John. 2004. After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. London and New York: Routledge.
Mol, Annemarie. 2002. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham and London: Duke University Press
