Critical Ethnographies of Education and for Social and Educational Transformation: A Meta-Ethnography

In a 2016 special issue on the relationships between ethnography of education and social, economic, and material precarity, Geoff Bright and John Smyth were critical of ethnographic researchers, for concentrating on discourses and discourse production only, rather than on material conditions to develop activism and processes of transformation against oppression. Instead of only identifying and critiquing precarity, and deconstructing taken-for-granted ideas to give voice to ingrained forms of oppression and marginalization, critical ethnography they wrote, should really be about changing, not only describing and analyzing, oppressive conditions. In the present article, we attempt to identify and explore cases where researchers have overcome the reluctance toward activism and transformation. Using empirical examples we will try to illustrate what characterized these efforts and what seemed to support their success.

Historisch-kulturelle Anthropologie

The background of the conflict study presented in part II consists of ten transdisciplinary and transcultural anthropological studies based on the paradigm of historical anthropology. On this basis, the “Berlin Ritual and Gesture Study” financed by the German Research Foundation (DFG) was carried out. This 12 years lasting research project examined the role of rituals and gestures in the major fields of socialization “family”, “school”, “peer-group” and “media” in the context of a Berlin inner city primary school. It provided the conceptual and methodological starting point for the exploration of the possible beginning of a mobbing conflict and the difficulties to handle it. In this study, a methodology of ethnography of education was developed which served as basis for the analysis of the mobbing process in Part II.

Interviews and Interviewing in the Ethnography of Education

Interviews are frequently used in ethnographic research, but it is argued that they pose particular difficulties in interpretation. While ethnographers are interested in understanding how people construct and interpret cultures in their natural settings, interviews are based on rules that counteract most normal interactions. Thus interviews in ethnography can only be interpreted within the context of that wider ethnography and the data generated has to be tested against other data generated by different means and data generated in other interviews. Although some ethnographers avoid the use of interviews, others use a range of different forms of interviews. It is argued that Basil Bernstein’s concepts of classification and framing can be used to clarify the range of forms and to highlight the potential relationships between the form of interview and class, gender, and ethnicity.