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This paper presents a theoretically influenced discussion of methodological issues in carrying out ethnographic work at Peartree Academy. Food is central to our sense of identity. It draws on notions of the school restaurant and presents an account of the complexities surrounding the disorderliness of fieldwork in researching children's food space. The aim of this paper is to explore how researcher identity needs to be considered within the relationship between discipline and social learning spaces for eating. Foucault's concept of discipline is introduced in conceptualising the study. Key reflections place emphasis on the messiness of researching such spaces and offer recommendations for navigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parents are the key people in the family when it comes to determining the extent and type of education for their children. Within the theoretical frameworks of African feminisms, human capital theory, and the liminality theory, this paper examines the parental perceptions of the girls' secondary education in Tanzania's rural communities. Moreover, it determines the effects of those perceptions on the girls' secondary schooling in rural Tanzania. Using the ethnographic research design, this qualitative study found that, although some parents perceived girls' secondary education negatively, there were some glimmers of hope and changing attitudes among parents. The findings further indicate that there are tensions and conflicting perspectives, as some of the parents struggled to reconcile emerging beliefs about girls' education with the existing largely conservative cultural and familial practices. This changing perception on the girls' secondary education signals a favourable disposition towards the improvement of girls' secondary schooling, particularly in the largely conservative rural communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women of Color in higher education often experience cultural taxation alongside feelings of invisibility and hypervisibility. In this paper, two women faculty of color use duoethnography, a dialogic research method, to unpack a shared journal that documented their own experiences of navigating and negotiating predominantly White academic spaces. By analyzing their experiences, the researchers discovered that their shared journal revealed similar patterns documented by other women faculty of color. The dialogic nature of duoethnography also led to transformational understandings of their positionality in the academy, self-healing, and development of strategies for moving forward. Vignettes from their shared journal and dialogic excerpts are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reflects on a research-creation project that investigates the ways in which surveillance is experienced by youth as an embodiment that might be difficult to articulate in words but rather expressed affectively, through emotion and social practice. Our argument is that the aesthetic intervention provoked by research-creation can instantiate encounters that capture surveillance as an ineffable experience of everyday life. We situate our methodological claims in a concrete case study that considers youth engagement with a commissioned contemporary art project. Drawing on the writings of child and youth psychoanalyst W.D. Winnicott, we theorize the importance of a facilitating environment to create the conditions for young people to freely and playfully express meanings they make in their encounters with art. Research-creation suggests a perspective of resistance and failure as productive and constitutive of the possibilities of coming to know, both for the research subjects and ultimately for the authors in their orientation to research inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the experience of researching food in schools. Food is personal. It is an ingested symbol of culture, family, tradition, ethnicity... What does this mean as a researcher? How do we navigate food relationships? How is this relationship shaped by the rules of the school? This paper examines how I went about doing food research in primary schools, and the various incidents that occurred that revealed food was something more than that consumed. It outlines the ethnographic approach adopted, paying attention to the sensory in research. I explore researcher identity, explaining how my own identity was multiple, and shifting, depending on where I was at a particular "food moment". I draw attention to several events that, on reflection, serve to reveal the importance of food in everyday life, and helped understand both the field site, and the wider context of the research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we argue that love is not only compatible with validity in social inquiry but is an essential part of it. The work of coming to know others is similar to the work of emotional relationship, and the two overlap. In the ethnographic tradition, validity, or trustworthiness in research is established through practices like transparency about one's position, careful listening, detailed sensory description, time in the field, participant feedback, participation in daily activities, acknowledgment of impermanence, willingness to set aside assumptions and an attempt to engage readers with the community being studied. We argue that these activities are core both to valid studies and to love. The epistemological understanding of love in our ethnography goes beyond rational and objective notions of research. It includes them but it acknowledges, too, that affect and recognition are fundamental to how we make sense of the world. We invite qualitative researchers to enlarge the scope of academic discourse by including love explicitly; both as a rationale for research and as a support for the trustworthiness of our findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this theoretical paper, I examine the role and potential alterations to uses of social categories in qualitative research. Categories are socially constructed, imbued with power, and include race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability. These categories, although constructs and subject to change, hold durability and are leveraged in much of social science, including qualitative research. To engage with how difference within and across categories can be engaged in multiple ways, I describe a portion of longitudinal ethnographic data to raise up the question of what theories do what kinds of work with contested social categories. This excerpted transcript is not proposed as an exemplar or model. Building on Jackson and Mazzei methodology of reading with theory, I present the interaction as read with three theoretical frameworks: intersectionality intra-action , and Kawagley's interconnectedness. I argue that this approach to social theories which upends and mingles the order of theory and data, surfaces important questions about what we ask categories to do, what they do to knowledge systems, and how categories themselves should be addressed through a studied use of theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a critical reflection of a critical ethnography, a study focused on how 'healthy lifestyle education' programmes were implemented and experienced in two primary schools. In an attempt to disrupt the status quo I employed a range of ethnographic methods: 'hanging out' with children and adults; building trusting relationships; having research conversations with participants; observing children and adults; and, journaling. However, the messy assemblage of diverse organisations, people, relations of power, discourses, truths, and practices, resulted in the emergence of ethical and methodological conundrums, including how to represent children's voices, whether (or not) to 'intervene' during problematic pedagogical moments, and how to 'act' as a critical ethnographic researcher in schools. Applying a critical lens to my own methodology helped to ensure that I embarked on a continuous, reflexive process; one that enabled a critique of research methods and a negotiation of issues of power, positionality, and privilege. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Resistance to simple narratives in education research comes from the stance that they render findings useless for the political work of understanding contexts of education as they exist today. This paper interrogates three stories of masking choices from a four year postcritical ethnographic study in the rural rustbelt Midwestern United States. These stories make visible how masking operates as both process and product within and part of white supremacist and colonizing systems. The author calls critical qualitative and postcritical researchers to interrogate the role of protection, answerability, and specificity in their work towards justice in terms of masking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on empirical data from two ethnographic studies on familial im/migration and education on both sides of the Mexico–U.S. border, in this article, we focus on critical incidents that resulted in listening realignment during data collection in which children deploy their politicized funds of knowledge (PFOK) (Gallo & Link) to shape the form and content of our research. We argue that as researchers in educational settings we must reflect on these exceptional moments and reframe our methods of talking with im/migrant children to engage with their politicized funds of knowledge. This entails following children's leads as the experts of their lives while opening up spaces for their PFOK, including their range of narrative approaches that we may inadvertently discount. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article utilizes anthropological theory to examine the existing body of ethnographic research in colleges and universities, which remains underdeveloped compared to K-12 ethnographies. I identify two parallel developments in this field: a micro-level ethnography of college and university sub-cultures and a macro-level ethnography of structural transformations in higher education. What has largely been missing is a meso-level or institutional ethnography of colleges and universities that centers institutional relations as objects of ethnographic inquiry. After surveying relevant ethnographic traditions that might inform this meso-level approach, I offer an illustrative example from an ethnography of diversity policy and practice at a public research university attempting to transform itself into a more diverse institution. The article highlights the benefits and possibilities of an ethnography of colleges and universities rather than ethnography in colleges and universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For this study, the authors engaged in a series of conversations or pláticas to critically examine their understanding and use of the term Latinx. Using 'trioethnography' as methodology, the authors' critical dialogic discussions surfaced new and transformative understandings of the term Latinx. Two questions guided this study: (1) How do we choose to take up the term Latinx in our personal and professional lives? (2) What new understandings and implications of the term occur through our pláticas? The authors identified three themes regarding their use and understanding of Latinx: (1) the institutionalization of the term Latinx with a focus on inclusivity versus performativity; (2) the development of critical consciousness and liminality around the term; and (3) epistemological, theoretical, and practical shifts in understanding of the term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the conception of Black desire, a Black-specific rendering of Eve Tuck's researching for desire, I argue that educational research lacking critiques of antiblackness can cultivate damage-centered narratives that misguidedly identify brokenness in Black youth, rather than brokenness in society. Drawing from a yearlong critical race ethnography, rooted in BlackCrit, I demonstrate how four Black high school students' critical engagements with literacy reveal the ways antiblackness operationalizes in their lives and how they compose counter structures to this oppressive regime. Through critical literacy artifacts and interview data, I analyze the utility of centering a critique of antiblackness in researching for Black desire as revealed through the voices of the Black youth. Through the findings, I contend that Black students asserting ownership over their reality demonstrates the ways Black desire, through a pointed critique of antiblackness, can function as a tool for critical race educational praxis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consistent with their treatment of individual participants, educational researchers regularly use pseudonyms to reference their study sites. The rationales, strategies, and implications of masking places may differ from those for masking people. However, both practices are so pervasive as to have become unexamined defaults, and they are assumed as methodological and ethical steps taken because little good can be imagined from actually naming our study sites or participants. Drawing on ethnographic work I conducted in Garden City, Kansas, I consider how unmasking the specific place I researched rather than referring to a place like this place mattered through my fieldwork, writing, and dissemination processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]