Critical Ethnography and Education

Theory, Methodology, and Ethics

Katie Fitzpatrick, Stephen May

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000571301
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In this book, Fitzpatrick and May make the case for a reimagined approach to critical ethnography in education. Working with an expansive understanding of critical, they argue that many researchers already do the kind of critical ethnography suggested in this book, whether they call their studies critical or not.

Drawing on a wide range of educational studies, the authors demonstrate that a methodology that is lived, embodied, and personal—and fundamentally connected to notions of power—is essential to exploring and understanding the many social and political issues facing education today. By grounding studies in work that reimagines, troubles, and questions notions of power, injustice, inequity, and marginalization, such studies engage with the tenets of critical ethnography.

Offering a wide-ranging and insightful commentary on the influences of critical ethnography over time, Fitzpatrick and May interrogate the ongoing theoretical developments, including poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and posthumanism. With extensive examples, excerpts, and personal discussions, the book thus repositions critical ethnography as an expansive, eclectic, and inclusive methodology that has a great deal to offer educational inquiries. Overviewing theoretical and methodological arguments, the book provides insight into issues of ethics and positionality as well as an in-depth focus on how ethnographic research illuminates such topics as racism, language, gender and sexuality in educational settings. It is essential reading for students, scholars, and researchers in qualitative inquiry, ethnography, educational anthropology, educational research methods, sociology of education, and philosophy of education.

1Reimagining Critical Ethnography

DOI: 10.4324/9781315208510-1

In this book, we make the case for a reimagined approach to critical ethnography in, of, and for education. In so doing, we pull through the threads of traditional ethnographic practice from the past, focus them strongly on the political, and reconceptualize them in the contemporary moment. We argue that the theoretical, social, and political issues currently facing education can be explored via a methodology that is personal, embodied, located, and lived, as well as unapologetically concentrated on relations of power. And we insist that ethnography – with its attention to people and environments, experience and histories, voices and the unspoken, discourse and materiality – offers a methodological way forward in the current moment.

This moment includes the contestation of qualitative methods; ongoing tensions between poststructuralism(s) and postcolonialism(s); the challenges of decolonizing; and the urgency of the posthuman. While these current theoretical and methodological debates have the potential to shift thinking in education, the field is also facing unprecedented privatizations of learning (and schooling) and the related neoliberalizing of educational systems globally, as well as the continued marginalizing of working class, poor, and precariat communities. Increased moves to digital schooling and health surveillance, a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, are creating different kinds of educational divides in relation to access and opportunity and are redefining cultures of teaching and learning as well as notions of safety, risk, and the body in education.

At the same time, social and political protest movements have (arguably) never been so strong. The Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements – contesting endemic racism, and rape culture, sexual abuse, and harassment, respectively – now have a global audience. LGBTQI+ rights are also increasingly on the global agenda, alongside the need to address climate change, xenophobia, and the often-related discriminatory treatment of minoritized groups, including both Indigenous and migrant/refugee populations. While nationalistic politics have swung decidedly to the right in some nation-states, social medias are both reproducing political positions across the spectrum, while also enabling cultures of resistance to thrive, especially among young people. Such social and political challenges can create productive methodological questions for education research and cause us to question both how we produce knowledge and the ontological bases of that production.

In a recent discussion about post-qualitative methodologies, Tesar (2021) argues that we should be slow to wholly reject or set ourselves against certain (old) methodologies in favor of new ones. He notes that we are all caught up in disciplinary ways of thinking and being, even as we question those ways so that “[t]he millions of marvelous, wonderful, and very ‘useful’ achievements of our scholarly practice that work so well for us on one hand, if singular, quick, and rigid, can equally impoverish, diminish, and destroy our scholarly activities” (p. 4). Advocating plurality instead, Tesar (2021) encourages us to engage the “ideas lying dormant in the deepest roots of our scholarly work” (p. 3–4). We take this challenge to think anew with established methodologies without discarding the methodological history of critical ethnography. In part, this not only requires remaining skeptical of academic cultures of fast research and mercenary approaches to method aligned to the more mechanistic tendencies of the university but also requires us to question the theories and methods we hold dear. We suggest that critical ethnography can attend to these tensions by glancing away from neoliberal approaches to research and slowing down the narrative of research productivity. Critical ethnography is located in a politics of asking uncomfortable questions about in/equity and privilege, and it is immersed in social theory. It is thus a located, messy, political, and versatile methodological approach; it is also embodied and relational, a methodology that assumes the researcher is also deeply implicated and cannot stand apart from their inquiry.

We describe critical ethnography here as a methodology, rather than a method. This is an important distinction. A methodology is an overarching philosophical framework that sets the broad direction for research. It is concerned with ontology, epistemology, and ethics and their interrelationships. Critical ethnography thus attends to what Barad (2007) has described as an underpinning ethico-onto-epistemology. This approach acknowledges that we are, as researchers, inextricably entangled in the contexts we inhabit and in the processes of knowledge production. In this sense, “[e]thics, knowing, and being … [are] productively entwined” (Geerts & Carstens, 2019, p. 920) in any project. The particular methods that emanate from ethnographic research, that are used in fieldwork, or that contribute to the research materials,¹ are less important than the theory-methodology nexus (which articulates with the context, field, or research site). Indeed, ethnography (or perhaps, ethnographers) neither dictate which methods to choose, nor precisely what to do (see Chapter 5). And method is not the starting point. Theories and contexts are, rather, the openings to research methodology, and the dialectic between theory and context is central to any critical ethnographic project (more about this in Chapter 3).

There are a myriad of possibilities that emerge in the intersection between ethico-onto-epistemology, research questions and contexts, the challenges of logistics, practicalities and materials, and the relationships (and relationalities) within and between settings. A researcher’s interests, desires, and curiosities are important considerations, along with the kind of research materials we want to generate and how we want to re-present and communicate them (and with whom). The remaining chapters outline many examples, and a wide range of different methods, but these are certainly not exhaustive. Almost any method can be used with critical ethnography (including quantitative ones), as long as the general tenets are consistent with those that we will highlight in Chapter 2 (also see Madison, 2019).

In this book, we explore the potential for critical ethnography to work with and in contemporary inquiries in education, after (and with) the challenges of the posts – including poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and posthumanism. We argue that many researchers are already doing the kinds of critical ethnographies we imagine, whether they call their ethnographic projects critical or not. Such studies employ the tenets of ethnography and are engaged deeply in work that attends to, reimagines, troubles and questions notions of power, in/justice, in/equity, and marginalization. In this, different approaches to and definitions of “critical” are used (see Chapter 2 for a fuller discussion). While some critical educators insist that critical scholarship needs to work toward particular kinds of change, we accept Rasmussen’s (2015) caution against seeing critical scholarship as a pathway toward alternative education utopias. Rasmussen (2015) draws on Berlant’s (2011) notion of “cruel optimism” to “interrogate people’s desires for things they think may improve their lot, but actually act as obstacles to flourishing” (Rasmussen, 2015, p. 192). Berlant argues that optimism is cruel when “the scene of fantasy … enables you to expect that this time, nearness to this thing will help you or a world to become different in just the right way” (2011, p. 2, emphasis in original). Rasmussen (2015) notes that critical work in education falls into such a trap when it engages in imagining educational utopias that are freed from various injustices; a belief in the hope (or expectation) of change then diverts our “attention from important ethical, social and political questions” (Rasmussen, 2015, p. 193). This is not to suggest that critical work can’t disrupt or trouble existing practices, but working toward change can be approached with caution, especially if the imagined change is unaligned with wider sociopolitical transformation. We engage a more direct discussion of the “critical” in critical ethnography and with notions of change in Chapter 2.

Working with an expansive notion of critical, we argue that there are many studies that can be described as critically ethnographic and which, in their framing and orientation, draw on a wide array of critical theories. While neo-Marxist accounts of schooling have an important place historically in the critical ethnographic tradition, critical ethnography has moved and engaged with ongoing theoretical developments. We believe that many critically oriented theoretical approaches can be allied within and to ethnography in productive ways. Critical ethnography can be an expansive, eclectic, and inclusive methodology. We thus draw on a wide range of studies throughout this book and argue that such work can be seen as critically ethnographic, even if not specifically named or identified as such. This allows us to bring critical ethnography in education into the current moment – linking recent research across a wide range of topic areas to the critical ethnographic tradition.

Critical ethnography here then also highlights the importance of interdisciplinarity. Ethnographic fieldwork, with its origins in anthropology and sociology, and its wide application, has a strong interdisciplinary history (May & Fitzpatrick, 2019). Examining complex conditions, entrenched inequities, and their intersectionality – the confluence of dis/advantage across a range of indices, such as, class, ethnicity, gender/sexuality, and/or language – necessarily requires this kind of theoretical and disciplinary openness and engagement. This is what makes critical ethnography such exciting, rewarding, as well as, at times, challenging work.

But what about the posts? How can critical ethnography – located as it is historically in anthropological inquiry – possibly be flexible enough as a methodology to respond to the ontological questions raised by poststructuralism, new materialisms, and the methodological challenges of post-qualitative inquiry? We address these concerns in detail in Chapter 3 but, in short, we argue that the key tenets of critical ethnography in no way exclude the more-than-human – indeed, they are actually strengthened and extended by new materialist and posthuman questions. Many researchers already work productively between ethnographic approaches and poststructuralist theory, and critical ethnographers have always attended to how cultures, politics, environments, and histories inter...