By Hanisha Mistry

When I first imagined going into the field as an ethnographer, I envisioned something akin to Bronisław Malinowski’s arrival in the Trobriand Islands. I pictured myself stepping into a space where ethnography was an unfamiliar word, and my interlocutors, unacquainted with the methods of anthropology, would meet my questions with unfiltered answers. This was, of course, a naive view of ethnography. However, as a student whose only encounter with ethnography had been through books where interlocutors seemed unaware of the broader goals of the researcher, my initial perspective was perhaps understandable.

What I encountered instead was an inversion of the typical researcher-interlocutor dynamic. The initial meeting with the Centre of Learning Strategy Support team members felt less like entering uncharted territory and more like meeting an intellectual peer group. Rather than puzzled curiosity, they responded to my questions with thoughtful reflections shaped by an understanding of ethnographic methods and academic research. When I asked if I might attend their administrative meetings, one team member replied, “We can see if you can attend them. It could be great participant observation, but this observation would be online.”

At that moment, my first reaction was not to question the logistics of online participant observation but to wonder: How did they know the language of participant observation? What did it mean for my research that my interlocutors already understood anthropology and its research methods?

This curiosity led me to investigate their backgrounds. Opening LinkedIn on one tab and the Student Life contact page on another, I discovered that most of the team members held Master’s degrees—often from the University of Toronto—and many came from fields where ethnographic practices are foundational, such as Anthropology, History, and other Social Sciences and Humanities disciplines.

This dynamic fundamentally altered the nature of my fieldwork. The traditional power dynamics of ethnography, where the researcher often holds intellectual authority over their subjects, were inverted. Instead of being the sole analyst of a “field,” I was drawn into a dialogue where my interlocutors actively shaped the research process. These interlocutors were not passive participants in my research, as their educational training enabled them to interpret my questions through their scholarly lenses. While this enriched my understanding, it also complicated my data, steering it in directions I hadn’t initially anticipated.

In this shared endeavour, the boundaries between observer and observed are blurred. This collaborative process demanded that I adjust my assumptions about the researcher’s role and carefully navigate how much influence my interlocutors had on shaping my findings. Rather than simply collecting data, I found myself co-creating knowledge through dynamic, back-and-forth exchanges that added depth and complexity to my analysis.

Reflecting on this experience, I realized that not all interlocutors are merely respondents; they can be collaborators. Their familiarity with ethnographic practices added a layer of reflexivity that not only enriched my understanding of the institutional culture I was studying but also challenged me to rethink the very nature of fieldwork. This experience suggests that ethnographers need to rethink traditional hierarchies in fieldwork, especially when studying environments rich in academic expertise, to embrace a more collaborative and dialogical approach.