In this reflection, I contextualize my own experiences conducting educational ethnography in a synchronous online kindergarten classroom during the COVID-19 pandemic. I highlight how conducting research in online classrooms transforms ethnographic research methodologies and concepts such as the field site. I offer four suggestions, derived from my…

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…

Based on year-long fieldwork on activist-educators' work in South Korea, I reflect on how my research complicates the ontological shift in institutional ethnography: that is, the shift that emphasizes how ruling relations are coordinated through the very actions of people. I discuss two facets of reflective pauses. First, I discuss how the ruling…

In this "Reflections from the Field," we describe and interrogate our ongoing engagements with designing, conducting, and documenting multimodal field research as early-career ethnographic education researchers. Our Multimodal Scholarship Working Group engages with content across media and multimodal methods to promote collaboration and…

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…

In qualitative methods, there are various approaches that can be used to answer particular social questions, for example ethnography and case study. Two studies conducted by different researchers in China and Australia using these approaches were described and analysed in order to find out their similarities and differences in terms of…

The challenges of conducting lengthy fieldwork in today's busy academic world have impacted the types of research that are able to be carried out. In particular, traditional educational ethnography has become problematic for research beyond initial doctoral research programs. This article analyzes data collected during a return to the field of a…

This article addresses the difficulty of local-level qualitative educational research in Amsterdam in light of changes related to contemporary political discourse on decades of immigration, especially from the 1970s onward, and increasingly critical assessments of Dutch education in the literature. It considers recent developments in the…

Netnography (Kozinets, 2010) is an ethnographic approach to study communities that exist primarily online. Engaging in online participant observation, the netnographer connects to the online community through a computer screen, and the field is located inside the screen. Although it has been used in marketing research extensively, netnography is a…

In this paper, the author first places story telling in context within the broad range of effort associated with case study methods. Then, the author discusses aspects of fieldwork which underlie story telling, first moves, key questions, tricks, listening, looking and synthesis. The author concludes with evaluative criteria for story telling and…

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,…

This article focuses on what both psychoanalysis and anthropology have in common: the emphasis on the researcher's own experience. An ethnographic fieldwork will be used to illustrate how a psychoanalytical approach unfolds the material when studying conditions for learning from experience among teachers in two Norwegian junior high schools, and…

3D virtual worlds can and have been used as a meeting place for distance education courses. Virtual worlds allow for group learning of the kind enjoyed by students gathered in a virtual classroom, where they know they are in a communal space, they are aware of the social process of learning and are affected by the presence and behaviour of their…

Background/Context: In the United States, the percentage of schoolchildren planning to become high-status professionals is grossly disproportionate to the percentage of such jobs comprising our division of labor. As in a game of musical chairs, it is not structurally possible for everyone to remain a contender. Focus of Study: Various adults who…

Academic literacies research has been identified as an emerging but significant field in higher education. This article extends the discussions around methodology in academic literacies research by drawing on the current text and context debates in sociolinguistics and linguistic ethnography. It uses illustrations from a recent academic literacies…