ABSTRACT
It is just before September 11, 2001. I am standing in my sunny apartment on 12th Avenue in Vancouver.1 I am writing my master’s thesis. It is my first foray into ethnography. I had interviewed participants and spent a month in Toronto, doing observational fieldwork. Now back in Vancouver, and the excitement of fieldwork over, I am lost. My field notes, scrawled into (paper!) notebooks, lie scattered across my desk. My desktop computer, with its enormous CRT monitor, holds all my audio recordings. There is a blanket of Post-it notes on my apartment wall. I see myself, staring at that wall, arms crossed and brow wrinkled. I have no idea what I’m doing.
