19. Ethnography

The ethnography network aims to provide a space for educational researchers who engage in ethnography. We encourage contributions that discuss findings from ethnographic research, as well as contributions that focus on ethnographic methodology, epistemology, and practice. Our objective is to develop the field of ethnographic research in education across Europe through ECER conferences, further ethnographic conferences, as well as the network-related journal, Ethnography and Education.

Research Field

We see educational ethnography as research that

• focuses on everyday life in educational institutions as experienced by policymakers, managers, pedagogues, teachers, teaching assistants, parents, and learners. Other perspectives include those who influence and are affected by education, those excluded from it, and those who choose to distance themselves from those institutions. Major themes include gender, race, class, and disabilities.
• usually takes place over a longer period and attends to social practices, both within and outside of institutional education, through continuous and immediate experience in fieldwork.
• engages in a wider range of situations and interactions relevant to the field of study, to be experienced, observed, and analysed.
• investigates field relations, between practices of individuals and groups, as well as their cultural, political, and social contexts.
• includes theoretical perspectives to become sensitive to fieldwork and analysis, provide opportunities to scrutinize established theories, and develop new theories and narratives about a field.

We invite submissions that lie within this scope of educational ethnography, acknowledging that ethnographic research is built on diverse premises and traditions, which shape local institutional cultures of doing ethnography. Beyond this, we encourage submissions that focus on teaching ethnography, as well as submissions that discuss different ethnographic approaches, and their respective benefits and challenges. We also warmly invite submissions that focus on innovation in ethnographic methods, such as auto-ethnography, video ethnography, and virtual ethnography, as well as submissions that focus on ethnographic analysis.

The ethnography network runs a mailing list and invites all interested researchers to join. To join the mailing list, you can send a blank message to nw19-subscribe(at)lists.eera-ecer.de. We also maintain a Facebook group where we share and discuss current calls, conferences, ongoing projects, and publications.