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'…

For over three decades now, the use of digital devices and media has had a growing impact on educational and teaching practices in schools. Though ethnographic research has documented some of these effects, it has often done so from the neutral perspective of a non-partisan participant-observer and recorder-reporter of the events that unfold. The…

Researchers who wish to become insiders to children's cultural worlds need to genuinely engage with the difference in social power between them and their participants. Most published accounts of adult positionality have been provided by those who have explored children's school practices. The ethnography discussed in this paper focused on the home…

Writing fieldnotes is an important part of ethnographic research. However, there is a striking lack of discussions about how different ways of producing fieldnotes may influence ethnographic research and meaning-making. The use of "shorthand notation" is sometimes mentioned as a tool to increase the speed and efficiency of note-taking,…

This article explores the nature of ethnographic collaboration during the harrowing and unpredictable times of a global pandemic. Documenting Year Two of a five-year, multi-sited ethnographic study, which necessitated virtual fieldwork in global drama classrooms (in Canada, India, Colombia, Taiwan, England, Greece), we offer a theoretical picture…

Education ethnographies show that observing bodies, objects and settings can illuminate previously hidden learning practices but the relational characteristics of these practices presents methodological challenges for conventional qualitative analyses. Using an example from an ethnographic study of everyday learning, I show how methods from art…

This paper was prompted by the question, what do we mean by conducting "ethnography"? Is it in fact "case study" drawing on ethnographic techniques? My contention is that in many cases, researchers are not actually conducting ethnography as understood within a traditional sense but rather are engaging in case study, drawing on…

This paper explores the dynamic and situated nature of language education policy in an Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) centre through the lens of researcher-child relationality. Drawing on data from 4.5 months of linguistic ethnographic fieldwork in a pre-school in the Netherlands, one extended play situation that emerged between me as a…

This study employs critical ethnographic child-parent research to examine Korean American children's lived experiences related to anti-Asian racism, looking closely at children's ordinary interactions in their everyday lives at home. Children's conversations at home were audio- and video-recorded and artifacts created by children and from school…

Scholars have called for ethnographers to reveal the emotional and controversial aspects of fieldwork. Through analysis of our fieldwork with teens in the United States and Japan, this article documents how we, two adult researchers, attempted to address adultism--a pervasive system of oppression that deems young people inferior. We discuss three…

This article presents an ethnography of the entanglement of space, learning and teaching bodies and pedagogical authority in a primary school in Germany. We focus on the spatial placement of a boy diagnosed with 'special needs'. Inspired by Carol Taylor's analysis of a male teacher's authority at a college. we describe the boy's changeable seating…

Familiarity and distance is an issue that is much discussed in ethnographic fieldwork. This paper focuses on the topic of balancing familiarity and distance when the researcher is directly or indirectly part of the field, which in the study consists of an adult education context of two different teacher-training courses for upper secondary…

This paper considers how governors in the English "Further Education and Skills" (FE) sector examined their practice as ethnographers. The paper locates both FE governance and ethnography within the challenges of the performative and Panoptic environments facing English education. In doing so, the paper explores how the informants'…