Throughout 2018 we had the privilege of engaging with Julie Thompson Klein using an ethnographic approach combining interviews via teleconferencing and email exchanges to discuss many aspects of her work with the goal of understanding how she herself views her scholarly evolution over the past five decades. Discussions about Klein's life quickly…

This study, framed with a socialization lens, discusses the impact of using stories about early contributors in engineering education (via results of the Engineering Education Pioneers Project) as a mechanism to help socialize the first cohort of graduate students in a new engineering education Ph.D. program. Two instructors designed a new course…

Multi-sited ethnography has been extensively applied to migrants' transnational family life and to the underlying care practices. Its methodological underpinnings and dilemmas, though, are relatively under-reflected. How can the relational and affective spaces between migrants and left-behind kin be ethnographically appreciated? Against this…

The Tribal College Movement began in the late 1960's in some of the poorest and most remote areas of the country among some of the largest and most dynamic tribal groups. Of the colleges, only one moved quickly toward university status: Sinte Gleska University, located on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota. Its President, Lionel…

This article makes use of autoethnography in which I, as researcher, explore my own awareness of Asperger's syndrome and how this, in turn, has helped me deal with many day to day situations I have encountered. The work illustrates how actively engaging with one's own life story narratives can help the Asperger's learner come to terms with his or…

This article reports on a study of apprentices in England and Germany designed to explore young people's learner identities over time and in relation to particular learning environments. The research adopts a multi-method ethnographic approach, combining biographical interviews with multi-site participant observation. The article problematises the…

This essay about the work of a famous anthropologist is an attempt to illuminate one way that researchers could apply their findings about the behavior of people in particular groups to ethical considerations of social relations. I argue that Gregory Bateson (1904-1980) is a good example because he applied a few seminal ideas to a wide range of…

This paper analyses the conceptual significance of different methods of researching learning. Based largely upon our own experiences, we briefly compare the use of mini-ethnography, life history, cross-sectional surveys and existing panel survey data. We argue that there are strong affinities between each of these methods and significantly…

This paper explores the auto/biographicity of ethnographic research, describing the way in which our research pursuits can be seen as the replaying of past agendas. It looks specifically at the auto/biographic interview as part of the ethnographic data collected, positing it as the site of co-construction of new memory, and the re-enactment of…

This highly readable text demystifies the qualitative research process--and helps readers conceptualize their own studies--by organizing the different research paradigms and traditions into coherent clusters. Real-world examples and firsthand perspectives illustrate the research process; instructive exercises and activities build on each other so…

This paper addresses the issue of positionality in researching the researchers own culture and discusses its epistemological implications. Drawing on the researchers own field experience in which she entered teenage cultural space, this paper is an attempt at a self reflexive analysis of the relationships between the researcher and the…

This paper seeks to engage the cultural interface where Indigenous knowledge meets Western academia, by questioning the validity of traditional research methods. Firstly, it is a response to the challenges facing Indigenous people confronted with the ethical and methodological issues arising from academic research. Secondly, it is a journey "into"…

Reflecting on her study of working-class women's life stories, the author shows how several realizations influenced and changed these steps of the research process: collecting stories, developing coding methods, designing a comparative study, considering labels, attending to variations, addressing self-other relationships, and listening to life…

The relationship between life history, gender, and the discourse of modernization was examined from the perspective of a researcher with extensive experience performing evaluations about modernization within human services in Denmark. Three stories about site-based management in two human service institutionsa youth center and a boarding school…