This paper was prompted by the question, what do we mean by conducting "ethnography"? Is it in fact "case study" drawing on ethnographic techniques? My contention is that in many cases, researchers are not actually conducting ethnography as understood within a traditional sense but rather are engaging in case study, drawing on…

This paper considers how governors in the English "Further Education and Skills" (FE) sector examined their practice as ethnographers. The paper locates both FE governance and ethnography within the challenges of the performative and Panoptic environments facing English education. In doing so, the paper explores how the informants'…

This paper discusses the main aspects of an ethnographic approach to the Occupy Poble Sec Cinema Forum in Barcelona, Spain, and the difficulties of using participant observation, in which vision is still dominant, in this setting. The methodological challenge stemmed from the 'native' position of the researcher--a member of the Forum's organising…

The article discusses how the use of ethnographic approaches to the study of researcher-child relations highlights the importance of structures that shape and define children's actions. The discussion is illustrated by using case study material from research with pre-school and pre-adolescent children in Indian educational settings. The article…

Reframing immigrant families as transnationals, this article highlights transnational families' ways of knowing. This study is based on a three-year, multi-sited critical ethnographic set of case studies of four families in the USA and Mexico. Transnational families in this study demonstrated Nepantlera knowing, or liminal, bridge-building knowing…

This paper intends to problematise understandings of the ethnographer's presence in investigating contemporary forms of technologised learning. The ubiquity of new educational technologies raises questions concerning the spaces of education and learning, and challenges, at the same time, the sense of "being there" in terms of the face-to-face…

To what extent and in what ways should researchers share their views with research participants during ethnographic fieldwork? This article discusses the author's experience of adopting different communicative stances with respondents in the context of an ethnographic study of the enactment of the English National Literacy Strategy in a "failing"…

In a qualitative study of South Asians in education, methodological issues pertaining to the social interactions between the same-ethnicity researcher and researched are analysed and interpreted. Based on in-depth interviews with 89 South Asian school pupils and 25 South Asian parents, it was found that political ideology and shared ethnicity were…