This paper explores ethnographic fieldwork as moral laboratories. Drawing upon two episodes in my field encounters in Southwest China, I illustrate the nature of our method as a form of moral striving and experimentation. Fieldwork is a stage where practical actions become vulnerable ethical dramas in search for the situated good. Fieldwork…

By its very nature ethnography is an emergent methodology. To be ethical the ethnographer needs to manage research ethics in-situ. This need to manage ethical dilemmas as they arise often comes into conflict with increased ethical regulation and procedures from ethics review boards that require the researcher to foresee ethical quandaries before…

Childhood research is increasingly being conducted from different disciplines, and research methods for showing the child's world are also increasing and evolving. This article examines the challenges and opportunities of childhood research in an early childhood education and care (ECEC) environment from an ethnographic approach. The purpose of…

This article explores the ethical dilemmas encountered by two ethnographers in adult education research in a context where neoliberalism impacts on education settings, policies, and social justice. Everyday ethical dilemmas arise in thorny situations in which the general ethical principles ethnographers are regulated by cannot help them react or…

Though community-based participatory research (CBPR) boasts a robust history, challenges to conducting such work ethically and equitably remain. Common difficulties, such as addressing power dynamics and navigating mutuality, are heightened when doing participatory research with young people, specifically youth participatory action research…

This article examines the processes of educational ethnography and questions the traditional use of the field notebook and research relationships. It forms part of an ongoing collaborative study analyzing university students' learning trajectories. Guided by inclusive ethics, the study proposes that researcher-participant collaboration is…

As non-Indigenous scholars, what does it mean to engage with Indigenous methodology and how can Indigenous methods be used to offer unique ways of knowing in a responsible manner? What are ethical concerns using Indigenous methods given our own positionality? In this autoethnography, I grapple with the ethics of using Indigenous methods as a…

Consistent with recent calls to bridge the research-practice divide in second language acquisition, this article reports on the findings of a collaborative autoethnographic study that we, authors of this article, conducted as critical second language teacher educators. Conducting a series of constructive dialogues among ourselves for a semester,…

This paper reflects on the three main ethical challenges we faced when conducting digital ethnography in three autism Brazilian communities on Facebook: how to position oneself as a researcher, how to deal with the identity of participants, and how to manage data when anonymity is not enforced. After careful consideration of these issues and…

This article uses two examples from a video-cued ethnography conducted in a Chinese preschool to illustrate the ethical complexities of studying children in cross-cultural settings. Moments that raise ethical concerns also pose methodological questions and challenge the anthropologist's understanding of and sensitivity to the emic perspectives and…

Purpose: The classic essay, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak takes leftist western intellectuals to task for essentializing subaltern subjectivity. I say this as someone who is guilty of this very thing and is struggling with this very question in my work as qualitative researcher. While Spivak concludes the essay…

For anthropologists working with young people in schools, an ambiguous and anxiety-provoking balancing act is required; how can the researcher align with the relational sensibilities of ethnography while also adhering to the strict boundaries and risk management ethos of school and university ethics? Tracing research relationships developed with…

Researching in heterogeneous communities can present challenges for the most experienced of researchers, especially in the context of ethnographic work, where the dynamism and unpredictability of a research setting can make it difficult to anticipate the languages spoken. Drawing on data from multilingual health consultations, I reflect on…

Researching ethically is an institutional requirement and cornerstone of good everyday practice in conducting research, adopting a mindful consideration for participants and resisting the temptation to use methodological approaches which may exploit participants or their trust in the research process or researcher. In the context of outdoor…

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…