The notion of the ethnographer as participant observer, as an active agent rather than passive observer, is well established within conversations about method and methodology. Less well explored is the extent to which the inherent curiosity and inquisitiveness of the ethnographer might be reciprocated: how might this be established and how might…

Writing fieldnotes is an important part of ethnographic research. However, there is a striking lack of discussions about how different ways of producing fieldnotes may influence ethnographic research and meaning-making. The use of "shorthand notation" is sometimes mentioned as a tool to increase the speed and efficiency of note-taking,…

This article is a response to the methodological problems I experienced during fieldwork. It follows that the article is an experiment of creating alternative possibilities for thinking about ethnocentrism as a phenomenon in transformation in a contemporary, innovative, higher educational setting. Throughout the article, I argue for the…

Ethnography as a methodological approach presents the fieldworker with many ethical crossroads throughout the research process. This is because of the unique position that ethnographers find themselves in, the environments that they research and the relationships which are formed. This paper presents four confessional vignettes from a broader…

Ethnographers are particularly interested in writing. They have paid particular attention to the practices of making field notes and to the ways in which their public texts represent those that they have encountered and studied. To date there has been less attention paid to the kinds of writing that used to make sense of experiences in the field.…

This study examined the extent to which students fully embrace sloyd activities. Sloyd is a form of adventurous education in Sweden where school students take more control of the content and methods of learning as part of their weekly education. Hands on activities are often part of the adventure and it sometimes takes place outdoors. The study…

Fieldnotes are central to ethnographic practice, yet there is surprisingly little written about how fieldnotes are constructed. This article reports the results of some interviews with four well-known ethnographers of education who were questioned about their practice. It is designed to be a resource for those new (and, maybe not so new) to…

As part of recent complex transformations, it seems that higher educational organisations are being forced to reorganise, standardise and streamline in order to survive in the new political and economic context. How are ethnographers in general going to approach these contemporary phenomena? By drawing on the conceptual history of anthropology,…

Ever since the first ethnographic studies, the question about how people learn in different contexts was an essential element of research. Studies in anthropology of education have increasingly focused on schooling. Nowadays, however, the traditional topic of learning in out-of-school contexts recovers its relevance because the development of…

In this study, we argue that in order to understand the underlying causes of inequities in education, we need to look outside specific educational settings to the larger social, historical and political structures behind those inequities. Therefore, in this work we take a social justice perspective to look at the relationship between environmental…

The apparent simplicity of ethnographic methods--studying people in their normal life setting, going beyond what might be said in surveys and interviews to observe everyday practices--is deceptive. Anthropological knowledge is gained through fieldwork and through pursuing a reflexive flexible approach. This study carried out in a non-government…

Practices and policies of Japanese schooling for immigrant and marginalised students are examined through the lens of a primary school which serves one of the largest foreign student populations in Japan. Student families include Southeast Asian refugees, South American immigrants of Japanese descent, recent and longstanding Chinese and Koreans,…

There has been a rising acceptance of autoethnography in the past 15 years. Instead of studying social phenomena, in an appropriately reflexive way, some scholars have taken to researching themselves. Drawing on concrete examples from an ongoing ethnographic project, the paper contrasts the beneficial, even essential, practices of autobiographical…