This is a story about my first real encounter with ethnography—and, not coincidentally, with Michael Burawoy.

We met during visiting week at Berkeley in 2006. I thought, “I’m a Marxist. He’s a Marxist. We’ll hit it off.” He took me to a Thai restaurant. I arrived ready for a spirited political discussion over noodles. Instead, he interviewed me. He asked about my childhood, my father, the grain of my upbringing. While I stumbled through answers, he just nodded, slowly, expressionless. Only years later did I realize: Michael was doing fieldwork. I thought I was introducing myself. He was already studying me. Then he glanced at his watch, realized he’d double-booked, and dashed off, leaving me alone with two plates of pad see ew and a strange mixture of awe and disorientation.

Two years later, I found myself in his Public Ethnography seminar. We were five students tucked into a storage room on the fourth floor of Barrows Hall. No windows. Flickering lights. An unglamorous setting for what turned out to be the most luminous classroom I’ve ever been in.

At the time, I wasn’t sure I belonged in graduate school. I didn’t think I had anything original to say. But something about that seminar pulled me in. Michael didn’t frontload us with rules or templates. He created a space of discovery. A place to work things out—intellectually, politically, methodologically—by doing it together, over time.

We read whatever we wanted: Freire, Latour, Bourdieu, Mills, Gouldner. Most memorable, perhaps, was Paul Rabinow’s Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco—especially the moment when Rabinow describes staying on the shore while his companions go skinny-dipping in a mountain spring. Too prudish, Michael teased. Too much observation, not enough participation.

Tuesdays were for theory—intense, searching discussions and in every discussion, the same urgent questions surfaced: What is our relationship to the people we study? How do we construct knowledge? And how does knowledge lead to change? These weren’t abstract prompts or academic exercises—they were beams of inquiry, refracted through every text and sharpened in dialogue with Michael and each other.

Thursdays were for fieldnotes. Each of us had chosen a site and were doing live ethnography. One student shared notes each week, and the rest of us read them closely—not to critique, but to think with. To draw out tensions. To pose questions the writer hadn’t yet seen.

My field site was a boutique temp agency in downtown San Francisco that catered to high-end restaurants and hotels. On the surface, it sold flexibility and professionalism. But as I kept returning, patterns emerged. Stories and practices that didn’t match the agency’s polished front. Each Thursday, those fragments began to cohere. What I couldn’t quite see alone became visible in the company of others.

And here’s where Michael gave us a deceptively simple instruction—one that changed how I thought: after writing your fieldnotes, draw a line.

Above the line: what you observed. Description, detail, scene. Below the line: reflection, interpretation, theory. What felt strange or telling? What questions emerged? What would you pursue next time?

That act—drawing the line—created a threshold. It invited you to pause. To sit with what you’d seen. But it also demanded you cross over. That you risk interpretation. That you try, however clumsily, to make sense of what was unfolding.

I remember writing about how the temp agency I was studying rotated its best workers across different client sites, making sure they always had a placement. At first, I thought it was just scheduling logistics. But below the line, a logic emerged: the rotation prevented clients from getting attached to any one worker—and thus from hiring them away. Precarity wasn’t a glitch. It was designed. Carefully managed. Deeply intentional.

Michael read every fieldnote, every memo, like it mattered. His late-night emails were electric: “Why does capitalism need a temp agency?” “Jackpot! Brilliant! Magnificent.” Or simply: “You’re circling it — now land the plane.”

He told us: Pick one book. Not ten. One. Read it generously. Argue with its best self. Treat it like a partner. My midterm was a dialogue with The Good Temp by Smith and Neuwirth. That paper became my MA thesis. Then, unbelievably, my first publication. That was the moment I realized I might have a future in this strange, demanding, beautiful thing called sociology.

Michael didn’t just teach ethnography. He taught us how to see. How to think dialectically, to walk the tightrope between detail and abstraction, observation and theory. He taught us to be rigorous, but never rigid. Reflexive, but never solipsistic. He believed that the field could surprise you—if you let it. That theory could travel—if you carried it honestly. And that sociologists could be public and political, without sacrificing precision. These weren’t just values. They were habits of mind, practiced week after week, in a room without windows.

Losing Michael feels like losing a force of nature. We’ve lost so much in losing him.

He was our most important interlocutor—challenging, generous, always a few steps ahead.

But he lives on—in our fieldnotes, our classrooms, our questions. In how we draw our lines, and in what we do beneath them.

So here’s to Michael —Who taught us to theorize with care,
To write with rigor,
And to stay in conversation with the world.