Munk One students (left to right) Emily Chen, Daniel Kim, James Coady, Uma Kalkar, and Maclean Rozansky listen to Emily Hertzman of the Ethnography Lab describe the history of Kensington Market.

The ethnography lab was a great opportunity to engage with the people of Toronto’s Kensington Market. Kensington is a tourism hotspot in the city, packed with student-filled coffee shops, cafes, and clothing stores. Its rich history as a British, then Ashkenazi, then Portuguese immigrant landing spot, adds to the eclectic character that draws so many people to it.

An ethnography is a qualitative research project aimed at providing a description of everyday life and practice of a specified people and/or culture. It requires time spent in the field (in this case, Kensington Market), to which observations and interactions with the individuals in it are noted. Kensington is only a 15-minute walk from the University of Toronto campus, which made the entire “field” experience accessible.

Browyn Frey (left) guides one group of Munk One students (Madison Bruno, Yazmeen Kanji, Hera Syed) through the area.

A popular pass-time, at least in my family, is ‘people watching’; sitting in a café or a public space watching the people walk by. You can sit and imagine different narratives behind who these people are, where they came from, where they’re going etc. An ethnography is essentially a detailed reporting of ‘people watching,’ but it makes you get up from behind the glass and interact with the people passing by.

I take courses at the Centre for Jewish Studies and believed that the old Jewish-market element of Kensington, and the remaining Jewish storefronts, were where I would spend my time for this ethnography. However, after my first visit I realized the Ashkenazi element I was searching for did not exist in the interactions that I found myself drawn to. My ethnography needed to focus on the living and breathing community, and its dynamism did not include the relics of a past I wish I could have experienced. My focus shifted to the homeless population of Kensington. One particular observation has stuck with me:

On Augusta Avenue in front of Longboard Living (a high-end longboard store), a man stood on the pavement, facing the opposite side of the road (where our walking group was standing in front of Casa Coffee). He had shoulder-length, knotty brown hair. He was wearing a sweatshirt with the hood up. From the opposite side of the street, I could see him speaking aloud to himself. He held a crumpled napkin over his face with a shaking hand. He would peek out behind the napkin every few seconds. He held a steaming coffee in his other hand and would sometimes raise it to his face to watch the steam. The steam was catching the light from the sun. He swayed and took jerky steps back and forth. About 30 minutes later I passed him again on Augusta Avenue, he was standing in front of the same store.

Munk One students take notes on their observations.

Young professional whizzed by him on bikes, but he just stood with no destination in mind. He was incredibly separated, economically, socially, and physically, from the Kensington community, which, with increasing abundance of cafes and trendy shops, is catered towards a wealthier population. The commercial sphere of Kensington that is becoming increasingly dominant is for an economic class that this man does not belong. Him and others in his situation, homeless/poor, are being edged out of Kensington by the new crowd the area is attracting.

Changing the world requires you to be an active participant in it. These Munk One labs provide me with the opportunity to deeply engage with my city. Through this I am garnering the tools to one day interact with the global community, observe its mechanisms and patterns, diagnose its issues, and eventually solve them.