Maria Noun

Since it was my first time writing an ethnography, I thought it was best that once I had chosen my research site, I go into the field with a concrete research topic on my mind. I knew that my lack of experience would mean that I was likely to start off my observations taking note of all sorts of general and hyper specific information that without guidance would leave me overwhelmed once I started the actual writing process, and so, choose a topic I did. This proved useful when it came to shaping my research as well as giving me possible questions for interviews, and so I thought I would end up with a straightforward ethnographic paper. I kept my focus zoomed into my field site, but the more I talked to people and the more I researched, the more I realised that I could only do justice to my paper by zooming out.

My field site was a small park in a low-income neighbourhood that had been renovated to become a gathering space for the community, by the community. It as well serves as a place for the organisation that was behind the park’s renovation, alongside many other community events, to serve the neighbourhood from. Originally, I had meant to observe the field site from the lens of it being one of the few green spaces serving a highly condensed urban neighbourhood, and how having spaces, especially relaxing ones, to interact with nature might affect the community’s health. However, while interviewing my interlocuters, I found that they had a much more relevant and pressing concern on their mind, one that was personified by the field site, that worry being gentrification.

Throughout interviews, there were anxieties shared that the timing of the park’s renovation, alongside some of the sources of the funding for that renovation were too closely tied to the rise of gentrification in the area. These fears weren’t unfounded, and could easily be linked to the field site, but I was hesitant to pursue this line of information due to it seeming like a bigger topic then I had originally meant to tackle. But by talking to my interlocuters more, as well as my fellow classmates writing their own ethnographies, I realised how connected the topic of gentrification and green spaces actually could be, and how following this new thread of information would only better my ethnography.

I learned much from writing my first ethnography, but the key thing I walked away with is that letting your interlocuters guide your work, can only ever improve it. With my topic as a thread to guide me through my maze of information I was able to weave a web that much better reflected not just the people and place that was that park but the community it served and some of the problems that they were facing at large.