Constructing a field has always been a necessary and difficult task for ethnographers. As been argued by for instance by Burrell (2009), defining the nature and boundaries of an empirical field are key for the ethnographic process. In an effort to identify and bound fields and make ethnographies recognizable in relation to each other, a plethora of prefixes for the word ethnography have emerged. Types of ethnography have been minted such as critical- and institutional ethnography, and since the emergence of digital cultures attempts to define fields or approaches to ethnography as having specific characteristics have flourished (Hammersley, 2018). Prefixes such as digital, network and trace have emerged, indicating lineages from earlier forms of ethnography and attempts to articulate distinct sets of methods. In practice, however, many of these prefixes are used interchangeably and the differences between forms of ethnography can have little significance. One area that, distinctions between different forms of ethnography have significance, however, is in limiting or at least complicating the task of defining the kind of ethnography that one is engaged in as one works with an empirical situation that may not necessarily fit nicely in to one definition or another. One such situation is the focus of our work in a Swedish project that examines the possibilities and constraints in teachers’ work with a specific focus on how teachers regulate and are regulated by the digital infrastructure and technologies embedded both in schools and classrooms and in teachers’ everyday life outside school. Based on that situation, the aim of this paper is to examine the problem of locating and defining the empirical field in relation to different forms of ethnography.  

The backdrop for the study is the strong political and economic push for school digitization in Europe and other parts of the world. It forms part of a global technology market and platform economy where internet platform businesses make up the major part and reach into the core of schools’ everyday work. As a consequence, teachers’ now work in classrooms and schools that are inextricably embedded and inseparable to the employment of digital technologies. The ‘new’ normality of teachers is to be constantly connected to the schools’ digital systems that  has expanded teachers’ work across space and time and resulted in the creation of new digital work practices. 

Findings:

In our results we will present a reflexive critique of our own ethnographic engagement with school administrators, principals and teachers in Swedish upper secondary school. This involved collections of different kinds of policy, mapping of infrastructure, combined with participant observation, teachers’ self-report of online and offline work, interviews and focus-group interviews.

Contribution to education/ethnography:

Our intention is to make a contribution to the ongoing discussion of doing ethnography in the hybrid world where home and field are no longer neatly separated and where the distinction between on- and offline is blurred and overlapping.  

Burrell, J. (2009). The field site as a network: A strategy for locating ethnographic research. Field methods, 21(2), 181-199. 

Hammersley, M. (2018). What is ethnography? Can it survive? Should it?. Ethnography and Education, 13(1), 1-17.