Walking with bread in Cairo: Ethnographic collaboration between a researcher and a research assistant

This paper presents a mode of collaboration between a researcher and research assistant for ethnographic data collection. We describe our experience as a researcher, who previously conducted fieldwork in Egypt but is now largely situated in the United States due to having young children, and a Cairo-based research assistant, who conducted participant observation of everyday practices of buying and eating subsidized bread for the researcher’s book project on bread, wheat, and security in Egypt. We position our narratives of this process side-by-side, interspersed by joint reflections, addressing questions regarding power asymmetries, the distribution of benefits, and what makes research collaborations work well. We argue that partnering in observation brings the benefit of more than one way of seeing and thinking through data. Moreover, we propose that this form of collaboration can be an effective strategy for researchers for whom continuous presence in their fieldsite is not possible.