Every project leaves behind what it could not hold: drafts, fragments, proposals that failed, ideas that exhausted themselves. This space gathers those remains—not as confessions of defeat, but as methodological residues. Each entry documents an incomplete gesture: a rejected paper or application, a fieldwork detour, a drawing that refused to resolve. Together, they form a museum of what ethnography discards in order to become something else.
Rather than hiding these moments, this collection turns them into tools for reflection. Failure, interruption, and abandonment are not only part of the research process; they are its silent teachers. They show how ideas decay, mutate, or find new life elsewhere. This is an archive of methodological vulnerability—an invitation to consider the half-made, the undone, and the impossible as integral to ethnographic practice. Each piece is both a record and a lesson in letting go.
Rejection becomes a moment of redirection: papers that never passed review, projects that were not funded, and proposals that did not fit. Each refusal leaves a trace—feedback, hesitation, or bureaucratic silence—that becomes part of the research’s texture. Abandonment, meanwhile, is quieter. It arrives when curiosity fades, when an idea refuses to unfold, or when life moves elsewhere. The drafts, sketches, field notes, and concepts left behind are not failures, but unfinished companions—materials that gesture toward other directions, other futures.
