Based on three vignettes taken from interviews with friends who were members of a social-ecological transition initiative of which I was both an active participant and a researcher, this paper explores ethnography in friendship. Breaking with the methodological proposals known as friendship as method, this text proposes to reflect on the ways…

This document aims to help education ethnographers to think about, describe and complete their scientific research: based on a personal research curricula and ongoing scientific discussions in social sciences and psychology, I develop an anthropology synthesis of three epistemic distances. (1) Cultural distance from fieldwork: How far is the…

This article addresses key issues embedded within what some commentators are describing as a "virtual" or "digital" ethnography. Namely, that through the adoption of new (virtual) spaces for ethnographic inquiry it is possible to trouble previous notions of site, place, space and meaning when collaborating in online fields.…

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"…

Arrival stories are said to be typical components of anthropologically informed ethnographies in which the ethnographer as "stranger" comes face to face with research subjects as "others", establishes a context for the research and perhaps uses the story to justify the validity of his or her observations. The notion of a conventional ethnographic…

This paper reflexively explores an initiatory period of ethnographic fieldwork undertaken in a UK secondary school by a first-time researcher. Concern is expressed over the tendency to memorialise early encounters, the impression being given that reflexive accounts should be "saved" for later in the academic career, when previously…

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…