This article uses ethnographic research from two Year 8 classes in two middle-sized secondary schools about a kilometre apart in a Swedish west-coast town to examine how new policies for personalised learning have developed in practice, in the performative cultures of modern schools in a commodity society. One school stands in a predominantly middle-class area of privately owned 'low-rise' houses. The other is in an area of 'high-rise' rented accommodation, where the first language of many homes is not Swedish. The differences are important. According to the article, personalised learning mobilises material and social resources in these schools that support new forms of individualistic, selfish and private accumulations of education goods from public provision and a valorisation of self-interest and private value as the common basis for educational culture. The article describes this cultural production in school and links it to processes of cultural and social reproduction.

The idea of democratic schooling with its emphasis on equality is seriously attacked by the marketisation of education. New policies of educational restructuring emphasise accountability and close links between school and industry, where schools and students become targets of constant evaluation and competition. This book challenges such policies and practices through analyses of their negative consequences for social justice and democracy. It explores the effects of restructuring on everyday life in schools and other educational institutions and presents analyses of how differences based on gender, social class, ethnicity, nationality and embodiment are dealt with in educational settings. The authors draw on a range of theories, including poststructuralist, postcolonial, feminist and Marxist perspectives, and the localised ethnographies are contextualised in changing educational politics. How policies are contradicted by practices is discussed in relation to the classroom, teacher education and issues of inclusion and exclusion. A critical gaze is directed at Nordic countries where restructuring processes contradict a political discourse based on equality and comprehensive education. It is the immersion in the daily life of institutions and their participants that gives ethnography a particular edge in obtaining insights into what changes and what stays the same. This book provides a looking glass into the tensions and contradictions that New Right policies have introduced in educational institutions. Actors in the field experience frustration in introducing changes and controlling the direction of those changes. It is their voices that ethnographers try to hear and disseminate. Most ethnographers do not simply tell a (more or less) gripping story about the field - they aim to analyse the practices they encounter, and endeavour to render them into analytical narratives that tell different stories than those produced through policy research or questionnaires and interviews. Although these are not necessarily better stories, we suggest that they are particularly relevant in demonstrating the organisation and practice of producing difference. (Description by the publisher).

Catalogs project subject field experience onto a multidimensional map which is then converted to a hierarchical list. In the case of the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Tale Type Catalog (ATU), this subject field is the global pattern of tale content defining tale types as canonical motif sequences. To extract and visualize such a map, we considered ATU as a corpus and ana-lysed two segments of it, “Supernatural adversaries” (types 300-399) in particular and “Tales of magic” (types 300-749) in general. The two corpora were scru-tinized for multiple motif co-occurrences and visualized by two-mode clustering of a bag-of-motif co-occurrences matrix. Findings indicate the presence of canonical content units above motif level as well. The organization scheme of folk narratives utilizing motif sequences is reminiscent of nucleotid sequences in the genetic code

This paper draws primarily on findings from an ethnographic study conducted in a marginalized area on the outskirts of South London, but also on analyses of web sites, newspapers and popular culture. The paper focuses on the young white working-class people in the area, and it examines their formation of identity in relation to visual markers of taste. The context of the study is the recent moral panic in Britain over ‘chavs’. In public discourse, the term emerged as a way of pathologizing white working-class youths adopting specific markers of taste. The study shows that most respondents, and the area in general, were positioned in the stigmatizing discourse on ‘chavs’, and the spaces and places that they are associated with. When interpreting the meaning of ‘chav’, the respondents drew strong boundaries against the term, and used it to categorize others. Many respondents also made strong distinctions against markers of middle-class taste. In contrast to earlier research, the notion of ‘chav’ is not related to a subcultural style adopted by socially excluded groups of youths, but primarily a form of categorization serving to pathologize important aspects of the working-class culture in the area. This is particularly the case with the local style or fashion, which has become symbolically tainted by being associated with ‘chavs’. In conclusion, the paper shows the power of classed markers of taste in positioning people and in shaping their identities.

Människan i vården - etnografi, vård och drama riktar sig till alla som söker en metod att undersöka och förändra specifika miljöer, inte minst inom vården. Boken beskriver tre metodologier, etnografi, hermeneutik och dramapedagogik. I första delen diskuteras etnografins teori och perspektiv medan dess andra del visar på den praktiska tillämpningen. Den tredje delen av boken tar upp vilken form av kunskap som kan erhållas genom etnografisk forskning och hur en lärande praktik kan utvecklas. Innehållet i boken rör sig mellan metodologi och fältarbete, deltagande observation, berättelse, etnografiskt skrivande och dramapedagogik i vårdmiljö. En viktig fråga är hur den subjektiva erfarenheten blir kroppsliggjord och hur den kan förstås i sitt sociala sammanhang. Författarna introducerar både teoretiskt och praktiskt, en förening mellan etnografi och dramapedagogik som de benämner etnografiskt drama.

This book draws on the work of three experienced ethnographers who have studied the effects of education policy on teachers’ work in the United Kingdom and Sweden. The book traces some of the issues and experiences in the development of ethnographic projects examining policy developments—from planning, through analysis and writing, to outcomes as methodological articles. Ethnographic research into teachers’ work seeks to understand educational and social change. As in other European countries, the UK education system has undergone massive restructuring since the late 1970s, with proliferating neo-liberal modes of regulation. Policy has had teachers as its focus for change, recently redefining and reworking teachers and teaching. There is a crucial role for an ethnographic case study approach to complement analyses of official educational policy. In general, the experiences, perspectives and emotions of the actors who implement policy, and the social, cultural, political, economic and emotional contexts in which they do so has been neglected. The ethnographic method is well placed to study these areas of social life since it investigates the perspectives and behaviours of people within, in this case, education cultures. It charts the daily lived experience and impact of policy on educational subjects. Contents Introduction Section I—Policy and the ethnographic process No entry signs: educational change and some problems encountered in negotiating entry to educational settings. Geoff Troman Time for ethnography, Bob Jeffrey and Geoff Troman Researching primary teachers’ work: Examining policy and practice through interactionist ethnography, Geoff Troman Section II—Policy, representation and dissemination How to ‘describe’ ethnographic research sites, Bob Jeffrey The deceptive imagination and ethnographic writing, Dennis Beach Artistic representation and research writing, Dennis Beach Tales from the interface: Disseminating ethnography for policy making, Geoff Troman References

In this article we draw on actor-network theory (ANT) in order to challenge the methodological and empirical orthodoxies of anthropocentrism and interactionism that have long informed dominant discourses of ethnographic work. We use ANT to open new possibilities for understanding education as emergent in relational fields where non-human forces are as equally necessary as and possess an agency equivalent to, human forces: the principle of symmetry. We argue that this generates important conceptual as well as political possibilities in constituting different possible outcomes in the accomplishment of ethnographies of education. We draw attention to the problematic of the decentring of the human subject and the critical investigation of the interface between people and objects that frame this special issue, and also propose a methodological response framed by a commitment to empirical research through ethnography as well as a theoretical response framed by relational materialism, operationalised here through recourse to ANT.