The significance of sketching: Drawing a streetscape in a Nairobi neighbourhood

This piece examines the value of sketching in ethnographic fieldwork. Thinking with a sketch drawn of a Nairobi streetscape one morning, I discuss how sketching can enable a particular engagement with our surroundings that serves both as a licence to lurk and a valuable mode of recording what we see. I also consider how the sketch becomes a meaningful artefact that can be shared in the moment or later on, as another way of conveying an argument or telling a story. I argue that both the sketch itself and the practice of sketching can help us pay really close attention to our surroundings while accepting the limits to what we can know about ‘the field’.