Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic engagement in Guatemala with Indigenous youth, local community organizations, and transnational nongovernmental organizations, this article examines how young people imagine and work toward alternative futures at the intersection of extensive migration and a developmentalist push for educational attainment. I…

How well do we know how non-humans experience environmental stressors and how do we communicate that knowledge as educators? This paper addresses these questions by way of an auto-ethnographic account of the author's experience of attempting to listen to the Great Barrier Reef, off the Queensland coast. Through a series of methodological failures…

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…

This essay is a response to Jonathan Warren and Michelle Kleisath's "The Roots of US Anthropology's Race Problem: Whiteness, Ethnicity and Ethnography." In this essay, I engage with critiques about anthropology's position on the periphery of critical race studies. The discipline's lack of attention to racism and critical race scholarship…

In this article we draw on actor-network theory (ANT) in order to challenge the methodological and empirical orthodoxies of anthropocentrism and interactionism that have long informed dominant discourses of ethnographic work. We use ANT to open new possibilities for understanding education as emergent in relational fields where non-human forces…

The Ofsted Subject report series: Religious Education (2024) and the CoRE report (2018) critically evaluate the shortcomings of the current Religious Education (RE) curriculum in UK schools, highlighting a lack of depth and consistency that inadequately prepares students for a diverse and complex world. This paper proposes the integration of…

This paper contributes an autoethnographic account of how Paulo Freire's work shapes understandings of education, social change and the possibilities and practices of social research. Drawing on connections between anthropology and education (Schultz, 2014) that underpin "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" (McKenna, 2013), I explore spaces and…

This paper analyzes how knowledge is reproduced as "universal" in contemporary higher education and how this production of universality influences the application of knowledge. Using a case study of clinical psychology, it describes the results of over two years of ethnographic fieldwork in a university and professional settings in…

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…

This article is a slightly edited version of my invited award talk, delivered just days after the presidential election, when I received the George and Louise Spindler Award at the annual business meeting of the Council on Anthropology and Education, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, November 2016. In those first days after the election we were all…

This article presents data from a two-year ethnographic case study to explore how immigrant and refugee youth in the United States made sense of participation in a weekly human rights club after school. Three types of student responses to human rights education are exemplified through the profiles of students. The article offers new insights on…

When anthropologists of education, who embrace an activist or action-focused orientation, locate their work within community-based settings, they bear a responsibility to act in ways that not only produce new knowledge but that are also responsive to the immediate circumstances. Katherine Schultz's Presidential Address evokes two related…

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,…

In this paper we are explicitly in conversation with Doug Foley's recently published paper in "AEQ." Given our shared commitment to the linkages between intersectionality and broader social and economic arrangements, two noted ethnographers argue that the paradigmatic shift highlighted by Foley demands detailed attention to what…

Sudbury schools, which originated in the USA in the 1960s, are radical alternatives to traditional public schooling that promote egalitarian relationships between children and adults. Given that the Sudbury model has been largely overlooked in educational anthropology, this paper presents findings from a 1.5-year critical ethnographic study of a…