As three doctoral students, we conducted a collaborative autoethnography to explore how power dynamics in higher education played a role in our identity development as scholars. Through the lens of Wenger-Trayner and Wenger-Trayner's "Landscapes of Practice" and Foucault's notions of power, we specifically attended to how our attempts to…

We define community education as organized lifelong learning through voluntary participation in collective efforts to critically address both individual and community needs. Community education has roots in European folk schools, United States participatory democracy, and Latin American "popular education." Community education developed…

Many youth struggle to determine their role and cope with overwhelming emotions and imaginative dystopias around combatting climate catastrophe and capitalist greed. In this time when many marginalised youth feel assured of immediate and distant threat, it is vital for applied theatre practitioners and educators to nurture critical hope as a means…

The past 50 years have witnessed a growing presence of critical theory within different social science academic departments across the western world. The joint existence of a theory committed to exposing and criticizing various inequalities of the social order within academic institutions based on traditional hierarchies and prestigious…

"The fish becomes aware of the water in which it swims" is a metaphor that represents Yuli's revelatory journey about the hidden power of culture in her personal identity and professional teaching practice. While engaging in a critical auto/ethnographic inquiry into her lived experience as a science teacher in Indonesian and Australian…

The use of photographs in ethnographic education research is an emerging method that promises to enable scholars to collect deeper, more meaningful data from individuals who may otherwise be silenced. When used to empower participants, photo methodologies can remove what Foucault (1980) described as the analytical "gaze," allowing for…

Hem Borker performed field-based research in madrasa "Jamiatul Mominat," a residential girls' madrasa in Delhi, exploring the everyday lives of young girls studying in the madrasa. She interacted with a number of students and teachers in this madrasa. But there were few with whom she developed a bond during her journey from being a…

For over thirty years, a political and social battle over bilingual education raged in the U.S. and in and around the Crow Indian Reservation of Montana. This book, a period piece rich in political, historical, and local western context, is the story of language, education, inequality and power clashes between the dominant society and the Indian…

Youth empowerment is the main goal of sex education according to Dutch Government and NGO policies. Academics from different disciplines have argued, however, that the ideal of empowerment through education is problematic, because of the unequal power relations implicated in educational practices. Building on one-and-a-half years of online and…

What began with a few libraries' early application of ethnographic methods to learn more about user behaviors and needs has grown to become a significant body of work done across many institutions using a broad range of methods. User-centered investigations are increasingly influential in discussions about the shape and future of the research…

School communities find themselves within an overall ideological and epistemological controversy with regard to a drive for goal-oriented and "evidence-based" practices on the one hand and emancipative bottom-up developmental strategies on the other, treating empirical data as information to be analysed according to context, with…

Students in public schools serving poor and working-class students are inundated by the effects of high-stakes examinations. Teachers are demoralized and students suffer substandard curricular and pedagogical experiences. These effects are articulated by students and teachers in the high school that provided the setting for the critical…

Current approaches to designing antigang policies overemphasize the notion that criminality is the defining characteristic of gangs and that solutions require a get-tough approach. As an ex-gang member, I conducted a five-year ethnographic study and a fourteen-year informal study of Mexican American street gangs in two Southwestern states to…

This paper presents results from an ethnography of language policy which examined language policy appropriation for bilingual learners in a large urban US school district. The purpose of this article is to explore the space left by current US language policy for developmental bilingual education and, specifically, the focus is on how a group of…

This paper discusses the gap between policy goals and practice in residential services for people with learning disabilities. Drawing on a nine month ethnographic study of three residential services, it outlines a range of obstacles to the promotion of choice and control that were routinely observed in the culture and working practices of the…