In its most characteristic form ethnography is usually described as participant observation that involves objectively; and without any political interests in changing the course of history by either affecting the unfolding of events or influencing peoples understanding and self-understanding; participating in people’s lives, watching what happens, listening to what is said, asking questions and then writing about that which you believe to be most interesting for another specified group. From a critical ethnographic perspective, in today’s presentation I will challenge some of these ideas….
In the presentation I will support the commitment toward participation, interaction and learning from informants in their everyday lives as important. Participant observation and involvement is important as it allows research(ers) to get up close to sites of practice and interaction in order to generate a first-hand experience based account of what is involved in and is understood to shape day to day activities, experiences and understandings. It allows learning from communities of practice on a daily basis in other words, as class cultures with unique, self-valorizing, and expressive (symbolic) properties and it allows exploration of how meaning and action can be understood in association with self-reflection within wider historical structural forces and in terms of their local concrete lived and spoken characteristics. However, whilst admitting to the value of participant observation in ethnography, I want to point out at the same time that the history of ethnography as socio-cultural participant observation is not a wholly innocent one and that ethnographic research also shows a multiplicity of forms of praxis, some of which take serious issue with ideas such as researcher impartiality and neutrality, by making a claim instead for a commitment toward engagement, empathy, critique and feedback in the interests of social and educational transformation.
Invited plenary presenation at the VIIIInternational Conference on Critical Education, 25-28 July 2018, University of East London, UK