Fieldwork and “Community”

It was March, nearing the end of the second semester of the academic year. After wandering around the computer science department for a short time I sat in one of the large but quiet common areas. Around me there were a scattering of people in their early twenties, sitting in disparate places at the large common tables and staring intently at the laptops or printed notes in front of them. I was nearing the end of my fieldwork, but still

felt I need more interviews; I had said I would do 40-50 interviews with students in my proposal but had not completed near that number. I opened my email and sent a message to a student I had met earlier at a workshop, asking if he was willing to be interviewed for my research.

There was little talking around me. The large laser printer on one side of the room suddenly started up, its whirring and chugging occupying the sound in the room. I didn’t recognize any of the students around me, even though I had been hanging out in the computing building for almost eight months now. I heard back from the student a few days later, he wished me luck with my research but said it’s “crunch time” and he had many projects due and so he couldn’t meet. His response was not unexpected. The common areas could be bustling early in the semester: students were social and events abounded. But like the silent common area, once midterms and then finals came students evaporated or fell into silent “mugging” – studying hard for their upcoming exams in their quest to beat out other students for their place on the bell-curve.

This situation is of course informative for my research, but it also exemplifies ongoing problems with the way anthropological fieldwork is conceptualized and done. The idea that there are bounded and localized communities where anthropologists can study “other” cultural practices has been heavily critiqued (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Gupta and Ferguson 1992, 1997; Wolf 1997). Formulations such as “multi-sited” ethnography (Marcus 1995) and fieldwork as an “assemblage” of sites (Reddy 2009) have worked to complicate the notion of the field as bounded in time and space and help

anthropologist in defining and making “the field.” The concepts of multi-locality and ontology in anthropology have also pointed to the multiple ways that places can be understood and experienced (Carrithers et al. 2010; Kohn 2013; Rodman 1992; Viveiros de Castro, Pedersen, and Holbraad 2014).

At the same time, anthropological research at the graduate level continues to centre largely on an extended but bounded period of time for fieldwork, often in a particular place.20 _{Additionally, while anthropologists are generally more open and} reflexive about the process of doing fieldwork since the publication of “Writing Culture” (Clifford and Marcus 1986), anthropological texts continue to present a generally

cohesive picture of fieldwork teeming with the ethnographer’s insights. As Robert Desjarlais argues, the notion of “experience” remains central to much anthropological research and, while it is rarely defined, experience is treated as a coherent and

progressive process of personal growth and development (Desjarlais 1996, 74–75). In this way, while I knew the many critiques of anthropological methodology – in theory – in terms of both research and writing, I nevertheless struggled with the feeling that my integration into the computer science “community” and my knowledge about life as a computer science student should be developing in a more or less cumulative and

20 _{The internet and social media have blurred boundaries between fieldwork and non-fieldwork time. Yet,}

time-zone differences and differential access and use of internet applications and platforms across spaces work to reinforce these boundaries. Additionally, ideal degree completion times and institutional funding practices, particularly in Canada, place constraints on the time students can and should spend “in” and connected to the field.

progressive fashion. Computer science students, however, did not form a single cohesive community and my fieldwork “progressed” in fits and starts.21

The computer science program and department can work as a community for some, and various institutional groups and clubs run by both students and professors sometimes refer to computing students as a “family” or “community.” Yet, for myself and many others, such “groupness” did not define our experiences (Brubaker 2004). Many students knew about me as a result of my presentations and emails about my research in the courses where I was conducting observations, sometimes to over two- hundred students in a class. Nevertheless, throughout the length of my fieldwork I was continually reintroducing myself and my research. In only a few circumstances, mentioned below, I did feel sense of belonging or integration among students or professors within the computer science department.

There were instead multiple “communities” or groups that students formed and re-formed. When I asked students in interviews where and how they met friends, many suggested that this occurred in their first year and often before classes even started, at various orientation camps. Additionally, students formed groups around class projects, nationality, multiple shared classes, and participation in institutional groups and

committees such as the student hacker group, or faculty-based sporting competitions, to name a few. In one of my classes during my second semester I frequently sat with a group made up primarily of women students after being invited by one particularly social

and out-going student who I had met several months prior. My participation in this particular “group” was then somewhat fortuitous although potentially gender-based. Other areas where I felt part of a “groupness” include the group project discussed above; some gatherings of exchange students; and my participation in an archery class for several weeks. My return trip to Singapore also highlighted to me the connections with individual students that I had made through my research when several students I contacted were enthusiastic to meet again.

The bulk of my time, however, was spent outside or beside various “groups.” My position as not-quite-a-student who was not regularly completing assignments, and particularly not completing them for grades, often placed me outside the social connections made among students through their shared interest in and struggle with course-work. I did not have the same motivation or stake in doing assignments and finding the answers, and I found it difficult to manufacture the interest or urgency that I remember experiencing when I was an undergraduate student myself. I therefore also did not seek out help from other students in completing assignments, as I might have done as an undergraduate student.

This also placed me outside the flow of time of the academic semester. My research was ongoing despite midterms, assignments, and exams, even though these formed part of the subject of my research. Students, however, generally had different experiences of time. Once midterms started and then moving into final exams, time seemed to become compacted and in short supply for students: full of project meetings, study sessions, and never-ending last-minute assignment work. This situation provided

some insights: in writing down all the assignments, labs, tutorials, and other work that students had in a week, for example, I was astounded by the number of things students needed to work on (or even simply keep track of). Yet, it also shaped the “progression” of my research. For the second semester, for example, I tried to conduct multiple interviews in the first few weeks of school before students were loaded down with work, and I reserved library work for exam time. These shifts in scheduling were helpful, but I nonetheless continued to feel throughout my fieldwork like any momentum I gathered was lost a week later.

In this way, my fieldwork fits with the idea of an “assemblage” of places, times, and encounters (Marcus 2006, 1995; Ong and Collier 2005; Reddy 2009). As with many facets of my research, I have only come to this realization after much post-fieldwork reflection and writing; it is thus a retrospective coherence imposed on or pulled from my research. I used a similar framework to interpret my Master’s fieldwork, which entailed a collection of different “sessions” – regular but discrete musical gatherings and events (Breslin 2011). “The field” was then defined by my performance of the role of “anthropologist.” Perhaps because my doctoral fieldwork was more localized, taking place primarily in a single building and certainly largely encompassed by the university campus and temporally bounded by the schedule of an academic year, however, I was unfortunately less attentive to my own role in “making” my “field” at the time.

Nevertheless, while much of my fieldwork may have been conducted in a bounded place and time, my “field,” as such, can be seen as a collection of disparate

As an almost random assemblage of sites that come into coherence through the process of fieldwork itself: the field as deterritorialized and reterritorialized, as it were, by the questions brought to bear on it in the course of research. This process necessarily entails much movement, as much between physical locations closer or farther apart as between ideological positionings or frames of reference (as I call them). Tracking this movement, understanding the relationships between sites, one’s own positioning within each, and the demands placed on the ethnographer coming-into-being – these I believe are the means by which the field is made, quite alongside the objects of study that it yields then to ethnographic attention (Reddy 2009, 90).

Through these pieces, I made connections with certain persons, groups, and places, for varying lengths of time and varying reasons. Many of these reasons (for me) related to my fieldwork, but are also inevitably caught up with other purposes and practices such as forming friendships, sharing interests or goals, participating in organized activities, and seeking or giving support or aid. In many ways, this process also led to a shift in my sense of self. The process of writing this dissertation has imposed an overall conceptual and narrative coherence to my fieldwork that I did not experience at the time.