Purpose: This paper aims to explore how an academic researcher and a practitioner experience scepticism for their qualitative research. Design/methodology/approach: The study applies Olt and Teman's new conceptual phenomenological polyethnography (2019) methodology, a hybrid of phenomenology and duoethnography. Findings: For the…

The purpose of this paper is to document dialogic reflections of two researchers (Shin Ji and Eun-Young) who had conducted collaborative projects on education for youth with North Korean refugee backgrounds. By employing duoethnography, conversations were conducted on the following questions: What are the experiences that impacted our researcher…

The current debates in the area of researchers' positionalities criticize the notion of the 'insider/outsider' dichotomy and favour the idea of a fluid inbetweener position. However, these narratives foreground researchers' perspectives and often ignore participants' agency in constructing a researcher's positionality in the field. In this paper,…

How does shared identity between researcher and the researched influence trust-building for data generation and knowledge production? We reflect on this question based on two separate studies conducted by African-based researchers in sociology and political science in Nigeria. We advanced two interrelated positions. The first underscores the…

This paper gives an account of the impact of spaces of linguistic non-understanding and spaces of linguistic partial understanding in the first author's linguistic ethnographic doctoral study of lawyer-client communication within UK immigration legal advice meetings. The paper uses the researching multilingually framework as a lens for exploring…

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…

In England, the development of teachers' curriculum design capabilities has been identified as a 'challenge remaining' (Department for Education [DfE]. (2022). "Opportunity for all: Strong schools with great teachers for your child."…

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 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…

This paper discusses advantages and disadvantages of being a researcher in a familiar setting. This study was conducted in a nursery in Turkey. In ethnographic research, conducting research in a familiar setting plays an important role in collecting and analysing data. Familiarisation with participants and settings is associated with 'insiderness'…

Drawing on ethnographic data, this article chronicles a Japanese queer immigrant's English learning experiences in a metropolitan area in western Canada. Informed by sociocultural theories and identity-centred approaches to Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research, I highlight the significance and interconnection between social identity,…

Background: Prior to approaching any field site activity, the question of how researchers in education will interact with the participants in terms of positionality requires careful thought. Observation is often used by educators and researchers as a means of collecting informal data on children's development and learning in early childhood…

Epistemology has been recognized as a useful conceptual tool to explore how knowledge has been produced and/or reproduced in higher education research and its linkages to hidden global geopolitics and historical forces. The topic has attracted considerable attention in the literature, particularly that of scholars in the Global South (Canagarajah,…

This article studies the dialogues, agreements, and actions in defence of a fairer and more inclusive school, carried out during ethnographic research in a Spanish rural school between 2019 and 2021, the period in which an ethnographer accompanied the professional work of the school principal, also the tutor of a class group. The research is…