A focus on time-lapse ethnography: learning to teach

This article makes the claim that developing ethnographic work through follow-up interviews can add to our understanding of researched phenomena and explores how using concepts from Bourdieu and theories on the social construction of time strengthen the research design and add a stronger longitudinal diachronic element to data analysis. Extending an ethnographic study of learning to teach by interviewing respondents nine years after the study and after the completion of their teacher education course is shown to develop insights around the initial research findings by focusing on the temporal aspects of data. Adopting this methodological approach can develop small-scale qualitative work and contribute to an accumulation of research findings to avoid simply revisiting familiar research ground.     

Network ethnography applied: understanding the evolving health and physical education knowledge landscape

The progressively global, neoliberal, privatised, and digital education environment poses new methodological challenges for educational researchers, prompting a need to innovate. It has been suggested, however, that better commentary and reflection on methodological innovation in education is required. This paper considers the benefits and challenges associated with the use of network ethnography, one methodological approach that has emerged to address new social complexities. We explain the rationale for, and process of, this methodology through reference to an illustrative case: a network ethnography of the outsourcing of Health and Physical Education (HPE) curricular work to external providers. In doing this we map and critique three interrelated activities (i.e. Internet searches, interviews, and network diagram construction) that constituted our network ethnography. The discussion turns to how network ethnography allowed us to access new knowledge about the outsourcing of HPE curricular work to external providers by, for example, facilitating us in asking different questions, and foregrounding various stakeholders, networks and relationships that we may not have discovered had we relied on other approaches. This illustrative case demonstrates the capacity of network ethnography to generate rich data and offers a provocation for educational researchers to consider expanding their methodological repertoire.     

Something new: value and change in finance*

ABSTRACT

Ethnographic and social scientific accounts of the financiers that buy and sell companies for profit often homogenize the players in these social dramas, relying on blunt, totalizing definitions of culture or overly deterministic articulations of habitus. This article, drawing on a two-year study of private equity investors, offers an alternative analytic frame for making sense of how private equity people buy and sell companies. It explores the ways in which private equity people make arguments persuading one another and the larger public that an investment is worth making. Important to these arguments are not only substantive content, the evidence that investors marshal to support a thesis, but also reflective evaluation of what counts as good evidence, meta-commentary. It is in these split levels of analysis that we can appreciate the cultural diversity within finance, Wall Street, and investment banking. I will also suggest that understanding how investors are arguing substantively as well as meta-pragmatically begins to outline a useful theory of culture change within the world of investment banking.     

Latino Portrayals in Local News Media: Underrepresentation,Negative Stereotypes,and Institutional Predictors of Coverage

Given the rise in negative rhetoric about Latinos in the U.S., it is essential to examine whether this negative tone extends to general, local news as well. An analysis of 2426 news articles drawn from 55 local newspapers in 2015 reveals several important findings. First, despite the intense spotlight on Latinos, they are still underrepresented in local news media. Relative to the other ethnic groups and whites, Latinos are more likely to be portrayed through negative stereotypes. However, the probability of this negative coverage is smaller for news media with a big proportion of Latino audiences, or for publicly-owned media outlets.     

Working with rules: lived democracy in school

This study focuses on an attempt by a Swedish secondary school teacher to fashion a more participatory education situation by involving his students in deciding the rules for their group work. Five group sessions were video recorded and examined using a conversation–analytic approach. The findings show a complex interplay between democratic and undemocratic elements in the interaction between the teacher and the students, as well as among the students themselves. Throughout the material, the students often reconnected to the democratic discourse of the teacher and employed it for various purposes. This also meant that the students’ work with the assignment was sometimes set aside. However, because it can be assumed that the students pick up new democratic competencies as they partake in the sessions, the teacher's participatory agenda can still be defended. The findings are discussed in relation to previous research.     

民族志中的“田野”——论民族志对“田野”的建构

在从"摇椅上的人类学家"到"走向田野的人类学家"的研究范式转换过程中,科学民族志写作方式的建立起到了革命性的作用,而对民族志科学性争论却也伴随而生。以马林诺夫斯基《西太平洋上的航海者》为基础,分析民族志对"田野"的塑造过程,认为民族志反映的只能是田野调查地文化的一个侧面,并不是其所声称的"文化再现"。     

Learner subjects in study abroad: discourse of immersion,hierarchy of experience and their subversion through situated learning

This article investigates different kinds of learner subjects that study-abroad programs produce. It is based on discourse analysis and ethnographic fieldwork in May–September 2011, involving three students from a US college studying abroad short term in Europe. The discourse of immersion in study abroad valorizes a learning-by-doing, individual, reflective learner subject who learns alone by gaining everyday experience outside the classroom and by reflecting on it. Some students subverted this discourse and became group and classroom-based learner subjects; nonetheless, they all became reflective learner subjects. This article proposes critical analysis of the discourse and links that reflectivity to critical pedagogy.     

To perceive and to be perceived: challenges of ethnography in elite schools

Drawing on a larger study on “Gender practices and violence between peers: the stakes of mixed-sex education”, this paper examines the methodological challenges specific to carrying out ethnography in an elite high school. The researcher’s subjective experience in the field reveals the power dynamics at play in the elite setting. We also examine how interdisciplinary collective analysis of the observation journals unveils less-examined challenges to conceptualization in the research process. We call for the heuristic value when contradiction and subjectivity are acknowledged and implicated both in the field and data analysis, which leads us to articulate different social identities in the elite school environment.     

Out of the Shadows: Testimonio as Civic Participation

This article draws from a 23-month ethnographic study of mixed-status families living in an emerging Latino/a community to examine 3 undocumented mothers’ participation in the act of giving testimonio, or testimony. In this context, testimonio serves as a grassroots tactic for political advocacy and community formation that compensates for and reacts against the limited opportunities for civic participation afforded noncitizens. The findings indicate that giving testimonio in both public and domestic settings constitutes a form of civic participation in which undocumented mothers actually attempt to move out of the shadows and into a more public domain.     

“我们”与“他们”:内地西藏散插生的社会网络构建——一项教育民族志研究

采用民族志的研究方法,对北京市一所内地西藏班学校的两名西藏学生进行为期一年的深入访谈和观察,力图走进西藏散插生的生活世界,了解他们与远在家乡的亲人、藏族同学和同乡、内地校里的汉族同学、汉族教师之间的交往互动及文化体验,探索西藏生在内地学校的社会网络构建,并以民族志的方式将他们的日常行为及其背后的实践逻辑呈现出来。