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.…

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,…