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This article explores key aspects of my professional doctorate (DProf) that focused on the construction of my professional identity as an occupational safety and health professional, using autoethnographic inquiry. It promotes the use of the portfolio as part of the assessment for professional doctorates, and other further and higher education qualifications. The article investigates how, using autoethnography, this can be used as part of the research process. It concludes with my reflections on how undertaking a DProf has been beneficial regarding the redefining of, and the construction of, my own professional identity.

Autistic adults are at increased risk of both mental and physical health difficulties, and yet can face barriers to accessing healthcare. A meta-ethnographic approach was used to conduct a review of the existing literature regarding autistic adults' experiences of accessing healthcare. Four databases were systematically searched for qualitative and mixed-method studies reporting on the experiences of autistic adults without a co-occurring learning disability accessing adult healthcare services within the United Kingdom. Fifteen studies met the inclusion criteria, and seven steps were used to systematically extract the data and then generate novel themes. Three superordinate themes were identified: "Professionals' lack of knowledge can be damaging," "Need to reduce processing demands" and "Adaptation to improve engagement." This review highlights the wide-reaching damaging impact misdiagnosis, inadequate or inappropriate treatment, overwhelming environments and inaccessible systems can have on the well-being and ability of autistic adults to engage with treatment. The lack of autism knowledge and understanding experienced in interactions with healthcare professionals, along with autistic adult's own communication and sensory processing differences, demonstrates the need for widely delivered training co-produced with autistic adults alongside bespoke and person-centred adaptations.

This article shares research, an empirical psychological case study, about cognition in higher degree art education. It proposes cognitive curation as a concept and practice that can develop knowledge and learning autonomy in and beyond the academy. Informed by the autoethnographic stories, interviews, and artworks of three academic art educators, this article's research demonstrates how cognition and its curation can manifest and develop in the teaching, research, and practice of higher degree art education. Open coding and framework alignment (cognitive, nexus orientated and visual) helped understand, locate, and exemplify cognition and curation in the research. Informed by the data, this article acknowledges how movement, identities, and frameworks, as learning strategies, can help facilitate cognition and cognitive curation. Cognitive curation provides means to responsibly form and follow learning, it is consequently relevant to the arts, education, and life. Art education's cognitive value is often questioned, this article dialogically contributes to the defense of its cognitive integrity whilst foregrounding cognitive curation.

Could the standardisation of language narrow disparities in achievement in education amongst people of different social class, and within and across ethnicities and genders, and could this have implications for injustices and inequities in wider society? In analysing socio-economic diversity through the lens of its correlation with language, this paper examines how the standardisation of language could be used as a means to reduce such diversity. It examines links between the standardisation of language, and the reduction of inequalities between socio-economic groups, in regard to achievement in education. It also examines the correlation between language and social class, and propensity towards being a perpetrator and/or victim of hostility and violence, as well as their relationship with health and life expectancy etc. The paper further examines the effect of the use of technology and teaching methods on the acquisition of knowledge, and how this impacts upon children of different social class within the learning environment. In order to help address some of these questions, an auto-ethnographic methodology is adopted with the aim of being able to explore, and reflect upon, personal experience, and to be able to weave greater understanding and connections between apparently disparate factors related to diversity, all through the lens of language and its relationship to aspects of culture relating to social class. Amongst its conclusions, the paper argues that the standardisation and enhancement of spoken language would narrow the disparities in academic achievement between socio-economic groups. The paper also argues that in order to challenge inequitable power structures which have arisen from historical injustices, then rather than concentrating on underrepresentation of groups of people within high status positions in society, the focus of diversity should be directed towards challenging the over representation, in a range of settings, of groups of people within low status positions in society.

The Ofsted Subject report series: Religious Education (2024) and the CoRE report (2018) critically evaluate the shortcomings of the current Religious Education (RE) curriculum in UK schools, highlighting a lack of depth and consistency that inadequately prepares students for a diverse and complex world. This paper proposes the integration of ethnographic and anthropological methods into the RE curriculum as a transformative solution to enhance pedagogical effectiveness and deepen students' understanding of religious practices. By employing these methods, the curriculum can offer a more immersive, reflective, and comprehensive educational experience, aligning RE more closely with the realities of a multicultural and multi-faith society. This integration not only enriches students' learning but also fosters greater empathy and a nuanced appreciation of religious diversity, addressing the educational challenges highlighted by Ofsted and CoRE.

This cross-cultural ethnography explored the global student mobility patterns of international students from English-speaking countries in China and asked research questions about (a) their motivational factors and acculturation expectations before arrival; (b) linguistic factors influencing their acculturative stressors in the host group community's culture and its academic, social, and public systems after arrival; and (c) their reflections on intergroup ideologies with the host community after graduation, based on looking ahead. This study collected data through fieldwork by observing and interacting with approximately 80 individuals from the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand in university towns in East China during the academic years from 2012 to 2023. In turn, 17 individuals who graduated before 2021 were selected as the final sample to conduct in-depth interviews. The study placed the concepts of acculturation expectations and intergroup ideologies at the nexus of linguistic hegemony, symbolic power, and social space. The overarching findings showed that despite positive motivations to visit China, language barriers led participants to express confusion, culture shock, anxiety, and perceived discrimination in their academic, social, and public domains. However, some participants who remained in China after graduation expressed their authentic voices regarding changes in attitude toward the host community culture and their heritage language. Therefore, this study focused on a different dimension of acculturation and linguistic ideology by examining how a linguistically and culturally dominant cohort faced acculturative challenges and negotiated to cope with their stressors in power dynamics.

It is now half a century since Joey explained to Paul Willis: 'Vandalising […] that's the opposite of boredom -- excitement, defying the law', one of many similar comments subsequently recorded in "Learning to Labour" (34). The book rapidly became an academic best-seller, and has since become an academic 'national treasure'. But, before a round of celebratory articles and book chapters which can be expected to mark the 50th anniversary, this article gives a critique of the research methods used and argues that the influence of the book has been detrimental to the quality and rigour of the research methods demonstrated in many current ethnographic studies.

The global pandemic prompted universities to rethink how assessment might be reconfigured to better support student learning across different modes of delivery resulting in unprecedented, large-scale, and rapid institutional change. Significantly, there has been a dearth of empirical studies examining the nuances of staff experiences of how they have managed and negotiated assessment change throughout the pandemic context. In this article we aim to bridge this gap. We are four colleagues at different UK higher education institutions who have all been involved in leading the sustained assessment response to the pandemic within our own organisations. We use collaborative autoethnography (CAE) to explore and analyse our approaches to enabling large-scale assessment change with the aim of locating sharable lessons for educational developers and others leading change efforts in higher education. We articulate key lessons generated from our collaborative exploration that we believe may be useful to other education developers and/or academic practitioners who seek to change the assessment landscape within a course, faculty, or institution. The lessons presented offer an alternative frame for managing future-facing assessment change in higher education that is sensitive to both the practice realities of practitioners and the impact subsequent change has on student learning and performance.

Making autoethnography outlines a method for combining the practices of making (sewing and crochet) and interpretive writing to capture the relationality of the self and materials. I discuss how I have developed my fascination with making as a conduit for working through the challenges of writing autoethnography and the personal vulnerabilities that this practice can reveal. I detail how experimenting with making autoethnography through the stages of discovery, development and embedding develops a practice to interweave my interpretation of the relationality and materiality of making. Through paying attention to development over time as well as the time spent making, this approach explicitly integrates a temporal framing within autoethnographic methods. I also explore how making expresses the complexity of relationships bound through caring and grief. In embedding this methodology, I consider how attempting to capture the diversity of making though recording time, materials and skills, can take the researcher closer to unpicking the qualities of making and how these are constituted by social identities.

Ethnograms are used to visualize data gathered from students' and teachers' talk in the classrooms of a secondary school in the UK. A sample of "talk data" is portrayed in three example ethnograms. The ethnograms transform non-visual data into the visual domain for the purpose of analysis using visualization and abstraction. Using ethnograms the "sound" of talk, as it had occurred during lessons, became "seen" and thus visualized which students talked most or made the most noise, where teachers positioned themselves and the relationships between students' talk and teachers' positions in classrooms. Through visualizing talk, it became possible to see space in the classroom which was louder or quieter and identify students who were silent. Visualizing talk led to alternate perspectives and interpretations of the data and surprising findings to be surfaced. Ethnograms are therefore posited as a potential method for researchers interested in portraying data for further post-collection analysis or to see, for example, sensory data such as mood, emotion or smell. Ethnograms are shown to be an accessible and viable qualitative research method particularly useful for researchers who wish to qualitatively visualize the social interactions and behaviours of people for interpretation.

Persuasive arguments attribute academics' persistent struggles in making time for writing to the increasing demands of a marketised sector on the academic role (Dickson-Swift et al. 2009; Macleod, Steckley, and Murray 2012). Whilst a significant body of literature promotes different writing interventions as potential solutions, the challenge of building and sustaining a culture in which their positive outcomes are maintained remains. In this paper, I explore the practices of academics writing for publication purposes. Drawing on the concept of academic writing as 'identity work (French 2020), I demonstrate that writing practices are entwined with wider academic and institutional identities, which either work for or against building sustainable writing cultures. I argue for a methodological shift in how writing initiatives are researched, drawing a distinction between my ethnographic case study of one writing group and others that focus either on retrospective accounts or analysing correlations between writing groups and productivity. Specifically, I argue for a focus on the ongoing "process" of becoming a writer rather than on its production. The study builds on existing literature to explain why writing groups are experienced as valuable to participants. It argues that they offer more than simply protected space for writing; they reframe participants' understandings of themselves and their academic identities and reintegrate research writing with other aspects of their role. This identity work occurs within visible, protected spaces for writing, where participants work both individually and in community, and reflection and dialogue are central.

Contemporary North-South research collaborations are fraught with power relations originating in colonialism. Debates about research ethics have tended to turn around the "procedural ethics" formal model and the "everyday ethics" practical model. We build on that to suggest a second debate that scrutinises ethics and power relations not only in the researcher-researched relationship but also in the relationships within research teams and ethics review boards. The research asked: how can we shift power in research to decolonise research and build more equitable partnerships? We explored this with data obtained through collaborative autoethnography in a multi-country development research programme, Evidence and Collaboration for Inclusive Development (ECID). This included regular self-reflective meetings, visual methods, a self-evaluation survey, and blogs addressing power issues. Coordinated from London, the research had all the cards to adopt a 'colonial' gaze in which the North would 'research' the South. The case narrates the journey of the research team to decentralise power in the programme, which included sharing control over the selection of research topics, and the research design, budget, and publications. Drawing from the lessons learned from the research approach that was adopted in ECID, this paper offers an 8-step model towards decolonising research ethics.

This ethnographic study reports on the findings from seven English secondary schools that participated in Project Faraday. The project was funded by the Department for Children, Schools and Families to build innovative learning environments to encourage students into upper secondary inquiry-based STEM. Despite the innovative classrooms, the schools emphasised A-Level university entrance science. Technicians prepared for specific science subjects, although teachers acknowledged the value of inquiry-based pedagogies. UK policies prioritising A-Level assessment were found to be impeding inquiry-based STEM, although wealthy schools had the resources to facilitating both A-Level science and inquiry-based STEM through clubs and co-curricular programs. Our data elicited important general design principles to inform makerspaces for inquiry-based STEM for adult learners. We concluded that initial teacher education programs should provide graduates with pedagogical experiences in makerspaces that enabled them to appraise contemporary school learning environments; and be informed about securing safe, flexible, and durable equipment for students.

This article explores how academics in a higher education institution (HEI) make sense of the challenges that they encounter in a neoliberal context typified by an increasingly globalised curriculum landscape. Two key questions are explored: What are the contours of the shifting boundaries which define the 'global curriculum' in HEI contexts? How do academics navigate and make sense of this fluidity in an uncertain and disputed landscape? Using reflections on practice emanating from the redesign of educational courses to respond to a rapidly changing student cohort, this inquiry takes an auto-ethnographic approach, offering the perspectives of five academic staff from a UK-based HEI through the lens of their lived experiences, and acknowledging the emerging shifts in identities that they experience and the need to confront tensions in this curriculum space. We conclude that our own scrutiny of, and critical reflections on, our identity and positionality as teachers and education practitioners represent a form of decoloniality, enabling us to find ways to share what we know without excluding knowledge outside it and to welcome contributions and possibilities beyond our own experiences. In terms of how we should act, we recognise that it must be through a dialectic that does not seek cultural supremacy or sovereignty.

Understanding student motivation is key to unlocking higher student satisfaction and allowing teachers to meet the expectations of their students. Psychology students have their own unique motivations. Using autoethnographic methods, a recent graduate and a professor of psychology come together to recall our own experiences from the classroom. From these, we arrive at definitions for two psychology student motivations that have stood out to us. We suggest how understanding motivations such as these can be beneficial for students and teachers alike. We discuss the benefits and limitations of using autoethnography to give our first-hand accounts, demonstrating the potential of this lesser-known methodology as a valid way to bring educational experiences into journals.

This article, via collaborative autoethnographic reflections, provides an extreme comparison of intra-period responses in two countries (the UK and Singapore) to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic in higher education. Taking autoethnographic examples from these countries from three pairs of stakeholders of higher education (HE)--students, non-teaching academic staff, and lecturers -- we discuss contrasting experiences in pursuit of answering the research question: What were our experiences working/studying in HE during the COVID-19 global pandemic? Despite the pronounced differences of the higher education landscapes in the UK and in Singapore and the heterogeneous experiences of them, five common themes emerged during an inductive analysis: impact on work, impact on learning, wellbeing, awareness and flexibility. There are significant opportunities to learn by examining the different experiences. We recommend overcoming the many separations between HE stakeholders and to engage all of them (students, lecturers (both adjuncts and full-time faculty), non-teaching staff) with the overall goal of improving the teaching and learning experiences. Technology should not be revered as a panacea and sound pedagogical practices are as important as ever.

Peers influence each other and learning can be shaped by shared processes. The purpose of this article is to pedagogically explore collective effort in the dance technique studio in a conservatoire setting. This practice-based research flows from the studio and has relevance for all higher arts education contexts. It is developed from the experiences of students and a teacher/researcher in the process of prioritising attentive peer observation as a strategy for shared learning. Qualitative data has been thematically analysed, through a feminist interpretive ethnographic approach, in order to bring insight to the complexity and interdependency of learning. Pedagogical roles have been reconceptualised and the influence of peers is discussed as embodied acts of recognition. Furthermore, the experience of disengagement among peers is reframed as agential dissent and the dance technique class is articulated as a potential model of understanding what it can mean to live well among others.

Marketization of education in South Africa accelerated at the crossroads of the postapartheid democratic transition and global neoliberal turn, reflecting both educational policy impacts of the country's protracted negotiated settlement and transnational trends. A controversial 2018 provincial amendment further entrenched marketization in the Western Cape by introducing "collaboration schools," public-private partnerships modeled on charter schools from the United States and academy schools from the United Kingdom. This article employs critical policy ethnography to argue that racial capitalism shapes transnational policy borrowing and to illustrate that a perceived portability of marketized reforms rests on racialized notions of the function of schooling for marginalized youth across contexts. I draw on Cedric Robinson's analysis of capitalism as a ubiquitously racialized, interconnected global order and Neville Alexander's insistence that antiracism must be anticapitalist, particularly in education, a site and strategy of struggle with dual potential to perpetuate or undermine racial capitalism.

This paper reports findings from a longitudinal qualitative study that explored the ethnographic learning processes of 10 modern languages students who spent one full academic year abroad, having first completed successfully an "Introduction to Ethnography" course in the UK. It begins from the argument that although significant attempts have been made to integrate ethnography into modern languages undergraduate degree programmes, relatively little is known about its actual impact on modern languages sojourners. Drawing on active interviews and reflective diaries that were designed to investigate this impact from shortly before participants embarked on their year abroad to the moment they returned, the thematic and critical discourse analysis of the data focuses attention on two key themes: students' perceptions of their host cultures and the impact of ethnography on students' perceptions. Findings from the first theme reveal that participants' perceptions were derogatory and that they used a number of mitigating discourse strategies to avoid creating a negative impression on the researchers. Findings from the second theme suggest that ethnography made little impact on most participants, given that their derogatory perceptions of the "foreign other" remained almost intact throughout the year abroad. The paper discusses possible reasons for these findings, arguing that the contextual nature of ethnographic inquiry does not always enable modern languages sojourners to dismantle the cultural generalisations they may make.

This paper discusses collaborative ethnographic work investigating multilingualism within education in Botswana, Tanzania, and Zambia. The paper takes a reflective perspective on how research is conducted and the role that multilingualism and collaboration can play in the research process itself. As a team of thirteen individuals, working across four countries, we bring a range of multilingual repertoires to the project. In this paper we discuss three principles which have been important in guiding our thinking and practice. These are: "researching multilingually"; "researching collaboratively"; and "researching responsively." We discuss the rationale behind these principles and the role they play in our work. We then discuss challenges and successes which have emerged from implementing these principles in practice and use these to outline a framework that those interested in conducting similar work can use to guide their own thinking and practices. The data discussed in this article consist of a corpus of vignettes from members of the project team. Ten vignettes have been collaboratively analysed adopting a thematic analysis. Tasked with reflecting on, and evaluating, the principles the vignette data provide insight into the opportunities and challenges of working multilingually, collaboratively, and responsively within a team with diverse linguistic repertoires.

Ethnographic note-taking in the field is often imbued with emotions, shaped by power relations and influenced by participants' voice and agency. Though enough has been written about ethnography, discussions on the specific challenges of taking notes, particularly in research with children are limited. Drawing on three ethnographic field studies with children in schools in the UK, India and China, this article discusses fieldwork experiences to understand the challenges, dilemmas and complexities around note-taking in the field. Using a reflexive and intersectional lens, this article discusses the role of agency, power and emotions in the experiences of taking notes in child-centred research with children. It conceptualizes the need to understand the complexities when theories are operationalized in real-life research contexts.

Researchers have attempted to address the intersection of multisensory and multimodal discourse practices from an interactional perspective. This study argues for the value of experiential, non-interactional multisensory discourse resources and proposes a conceptual framework of "multisensory discourse resources" to bridge visual and family language ideology ethnography. A year-long ethnographic case study of three Nepalese families (immigrant and transmigrant), consisting of 150 h of observational data triangulated with qualitative interviews, posed two questions: (1) How do transnational families, in the homescape, use multisensory discourse resources to provide cultural, national, religious, and ethnic identity framing? (2) How can transnational migrant and multilingual family language researchers ethically collect and analyse multisensory discourse resources as qualitative data? The findings highlight experiential multisensory discourse resources as threads of identity in the home that have yet to be fully recognised as research evidence by family language ideology and visual ethnography researchers.

The views of the children and young people experiencing Extended School Non-Attendance difficulties are scarcely represented in the literature. This systematic literature review provides a much needed overview of the existing research evidence through a detailed synthesis of the lived experiences of persistently non-attending young people, using a meta-ethnographic approach. Ten qualitative, UK-based papers were selected and analysed, each of which focused specifically on the direct views of school non-attenders. Using Noblit and Hare's seven-step approach, the analysis generated seven themes: (1) difficult relationships with peer group; (2) inconsistent relationships with and support from adults; (3) negative experiences of school transition; (4) negative experiences of learning in school; (5) emotional wellbeing and mental health needs; (6) others' negative perceptions of the individual's needs; (7) personal beliefs about attendance. Through reciprocal translation of these themes, the overarching higher-order concept was developed relating to the impact of a sense of school belonging. The implications of this review include an enhanced emphasis on the need to gather young people's views early and to use their preferred terminology when discussing their difficulties. While outside the scope of this paper, further research should look to the translation into policy and practice in this area.

Purpose: Extant literature tends to consider knowledge boundaries as a necessary property of interdisciplinary work. Knowledge boundaries are, thus, reified and treated as something to be traversed, transcended or otherwise negotiated. There is, however, very little work that closely examines the process of emergence of boundaries. The purpose of this paper is to critically consider the emergence, stabilization and dissolution of knowledge boundaries among experts during the design stage of a building project to understand whether knowledge boundaries are as delineated and predictable as the literature makes them out to be. Design/methodology/approach: A process-based, ethnographic study of a construction project is used. Building on a large data set collected over 13 months of research, this paper closely examines collaborative work around one specific issue during design development work that tripped up collaboration of the multidisciplinary and inter-organizational design team. Findings: Knowledge boundaries do not exist based on differences of substance among groups (e.g. being an engineer vs being an architect) but rather that they are a function of divergent constellations of interests, work tools and practical concerns. While holding binding powers, they evolve in the face of alignments and misalignments, agreements and conflicts. As interests shift, concerns unfold and tools are dropped or used; boundaries emerge or dissolve. Originality/value: A processual view of knowledge boundaries is advanced by demonstrating how they evolve in face of convergent (or divergent) work tools, practical concerns and interests. Existing research tends to equate knowledge boundaries with occupational/professional differences directly, but this paper demonstrates that work across expertise domains does not generate boundaries by itself. Resulting theoretical contributions are twofold: first, the current understanding of knowledge boundaries is refined by explaining how and why they emerge and dissolve across and within specialist knowledge domains, and second, the role of power and politics in this process is empirically foregrounded, highlighting how constellations of interests can lead to dynamic alliances or divisions.

Designing strategic pedagogical change through the lens of a student experience that is "yet to be experienced" offers a critical frame for embedding the impacts of transition, uncertainty, belonging and the complexity of the student journey into the co-design of teaching and learning. A digital storytelling approach extends the notion of the student experience beyond the singular and metricised descriptions common in online student satisfaction survey instruments into a rhizomatic, resonant living community that resides in the intersecting spaces of work, life, play and learning. This paper describes an ethnographic-like model of collecting and evaluating the student experience through a semi-structured digital storytelling methodology that supports both co-design and cogenerative dialogue as a form of curriculum enhancement. The paper outlines how the Student Experience Digital Storytelling model was iteratively designed, deployed, and then evaluated through participatory action research-informed case studies at the University of Sydney Business School (Australia) and the London School of Economics and Political Science (United Kingdom) that embedded the student experience into the co-design of curriculum and assessment interventions.

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) offers a bottom-up, locally situated and contextualized approach to enhancing educational practice. It has been championed for several years, yet remains curiously undervalued within the academy, despite clear benefits for curricular development and staff engagement. This paper reflects upon the production of an auto-ethnographic reflective evaluation of SoTL activities relating to architectural education, forming part of the first author's portfolio-based assessment for a Professional Doctorate in Education (Ed D). The paper evaluates the challenges and potential of undertaking this doctoral assessment path, which appears to be seldom employed, at least in the UK. Particular attention is placed on negotiated assessment by portfolio as a key driver for practical value, and the flexibility that this route affords for academics to shape their professional development through SoTL activities. Affordances and challenges of this pathway for practitioner-led scholarship and doctoral recognition are illuminated.

This paper inhabits the increasingly popular space of autoethnographic study. The piece is designed to critique and contextualise the process and usefulness of autoethnography as a way of making meaning. The study centres on how one highly experienced teacher and newly appointed teacher educator is using narrative writing to unpick and locate their skillset in a period of swift change and marked transition. One of the reasons for this choice is the freedom that autoethnography allows. Autoethnography is frequently dismissed as vague and self-indulgent as a method of social research. This paper will propose that autoethnography is a rigorous and powerful research method. It deploys some innovative methods of data collection, analysis and dissemination. The paper's discussion of the literature will naturally help interrogate debates around where autoethnography sits in the intellectual landscape related to qualitative research. The study found that using grounded theory as a research methodology helped arrive at potentially illuminating theories and self-knowledge. These were limited, however, by the underlying risk of indulgence, subjective autobiographical writing and participant bias. The paper also has potential value as a way of helping early career teachers explore critical incidents.

In this article, the idea of the 'colonial signature' is advanced as a potentially pivotal response to triggers that deepen or act as barriers to intercultural learning. From a postcolonial positioning, empirical data is then examined to consider the responses to intercultural-learning triggers of 14 UK-based student teachers on a study visit to India specifically through an analysis of their reflective writing and interviews. Participants' responses to varied triggers became significant colonial signatures to their intercultural learning. The learning deepened where responses were reflexive and articulated with reference to the global powerbase that underpins study visits to the Global South. Where responses to triggers provoked more shallow comparisons with home, the colonial signatures resulted in closed-down discussion, thus acting as a barrier to further learning. This has implications not only for study visits, but also, more widely, for the approach to global learning.

This paper considers the adoption of computational techniques within research designs modeled after the extended case method. Echoing calls to augment the power of contemporary researchers through the adoption of computational text analysis methods, we offer a framework for thinking about how such techniques can be integrated into quasi-ethnographic workflows to address broad, structural sociological claims. We focus, in particular, on how this adoption of novel forms of evidence impacts corpus design and interpretation (which we tie to matters of casing), theoretical elaboration (which we associate to moving empirical claims across scales and empirical domains), and verification (which we see as a process of reflexive scaffolding of theoretical claims). We provide an example of the use of this framework through a study of the marketization of social scientific knowledge in the United Kingdom.

The purpose of this article is to examine academia and the abuse of power based on auto-ethnographic research. I draw on my experiences across 12 universities in different locations in Spain, the UK and the USA that expose the way power is embedded in institutions of higher education and how it is maintained. This article analyses the exploration of inequalities which concerns particular social divisions, for example, gender, social class, ethnicity, non-national status and the intersection of these categories in particular sociocultural and historical contexts where I conducted my studies, research and teaching for more than 30 years. Employing auto-ethnography has allowed me to examine multi-layered lived experiences in the three countries intertwined with axes of inequality. Thanks to the dual focus on individual experiences and social contexts, this article shows how different systems of domination have shaped my experiences as a student and as a member of faculty in a transnational context. This heuristic approach has challenged me to generate meaning within a framework of ethics and social justice, recognizing that academia often excludes and marginalizes. Thus, this qualitative research enables marginal voices and the articulation of silenced narratives, hence expanding our knowledge of the relationship between power and academia.

This study discusses the impact of spatial, temporal and virtual mobility on how mobile individuals talk about language in their world, and how they use language offline and online to communicate over time and across space. We introduce the notion of "chronotopic translanguaging" to highlight the significance of merging time and place in sociolinguistics. Doing so, we present a rather stretched understanding of time to include references to real time, online compressed time, linguistic ideologies and practices carried over time and challenged in recent times, as well as understanding time as an ecological factor. We interviewed Ekram, an Algerian academic sojourner, and observed her Facebook profile before and after coming to the UK. Our findings suggest that the networked lives of the participant beget fluid translanguaging practices that are constantly (re)negotiated depending to the ecology of interaction. Through entering and existing multiple time-space frames, Ekram found herself reunited with communicative repertoires she has not used for years. She also developed new relationships with other repertoires. This study concludes by emphasising the usefulness of "chronotopic translanguaging" as a conceptual tool that permits, and accounts for, the time-place influence on how mobile individuals deploy their communicative repertoires.

This study seeks to investigate aspects of the relationship between the core academic activities of teaching and research in higher education, through a theoretically enriched discussion of the design of an innovative popular music module on Adele's "25" album and its delivery to first-year undergraduates on a general-purpose music degree during the academic years 2015-21. Drawing on autoethnographic approaches, it contemplates the challenges associated with the execution of a module on genuinely contemporary topics, outlining the case for the importance of ensuring that university curricula remain up-to-the-minute as well as exploring strategies by which to realise this aspiration in the absence of a body of academic literature that might ordinarily have provided strong foundations for the content of such teaching. These lines of inquiry lead to consideration of broader questions concerning the evolving relationship between teaching and research in light of the substantial changes that have taken place within the UK higher education sector in recent years, as well as the possibilities for teaching-led research, developed exclusively for and in the academic classroom, as an alternative to the more traditional research-led teaching.

International comparative ethnographic studies of ECEC (Early Childhood Education and Care) are difficult to conduct but worth the effort. Comparative studies featuring thick description and polysemic interpretations can challenge taken-for-granted assumptions, expand the menu of the possible, expose the provincialism of national approaches, and illuminate the global circulation of ECEC practices and ideas. Based on reflections on four major comparative international studies I have led, in this paper I describe effective strategies for conducting comparative ethnographic research in ECEC settings, explicate the rationale for doing so, and provide examples of how this approach can impact research, practice, and policy. Issues I address include the rationale for selecting countries for comparison, the formation of a research team, and distributing interpretive voice and power.

Until recently, the role of material culture in language has been little studied or seen as the context where language use is situated (Aronin et al., 2018). This article looks at the materiality of language in a new light by arguing that everyday objects such as kitchen utensils and wardrobes can be seen as deliberate and conscious collections that are entangled with speakers' multilingual repertoires, subjectivities and embodied agencies. Clothes stored away in one's wardrobe, or ordinary kitchen utensils reveal themselves as the site where multilinguals' complex biographies and 'jigsaw repertoires' (Blommaert & Backus, 2013) can be traced and made sense of. Such a view of language sees the construction of subjectivities as both situated and relational. Situated because subjectivities are firmly anchored in embodied chronotopic continuums (Busch, 2017), relational because they align to a post-human approach to subjectivity (Pennycook, 2018) that conceives it as the confederation of different types of human and post-human agencies. Drawing on a study of 6 personal collections of ordinary objects, this paper investigates to what extent personal collections can be read as a 'laboratory' for multilingual practices, where multilingual agencies are played out in relation to time-space coordinates and the materiality of the self.

This article explores the relevance and value of cultural geography within the undergraduate geography curriculum in light of graduate employability. The article is based on the assertion that employability is an objective to which universities are required to engage, and yet, cultural geography, as a sub-discipline, may be more challenging to map against the prevailing neoliberal employability discourse. To bridge this gap, I propose the use of "powerful knowledge" as a conceptual frame in order to demonstrate specific skills and knowledges cultural geography can and does offer the employability agenda. I briefly demonstrate how visual and ethnographic methods are deployed on two current geography courses in the UK in order to engage students with cultural geography. I end by proposing three key forms of powerful knowledge cultural geography has the potential to generate in graduates. These are: (1) situated knowledge and reflexivity; (2) thinking beyond the human, and; (3) a consideration of cultural landscapes.

The Race Equality Charter (REC) was introduced in 2014 as a national policy initiative that aims to support UK universities in developing cultural and systemic changes to promote race equality for Black and minority ethnic (BME) staff and students. Drawing on quantitative data, we locate the REC within a complex picture of undergraduate student diversity and significant attainment gaps between white students and Black and ethnic minority groups. Using qualitative interviews and observations to further explore the questions our quantitative analysis raises, we show that the REC is not perceived as a significant vehicle for progressing race equality work in award-holding institutions. Rather, it is mostly applied as an enhancement tool to help shape and sustain existing race equality initiatives that produce incremental change. This, we argue, suggests the REC's intention to inspire race equality approaches that favour institutional strategic planning at the highest level, is yet to be realised.

Researching ethically is an institutional requirement and cornerstone of good everyday practice in conducting research, adopting a mindful consideration for participants and resisting the temptation to use methodological approaches which may exploit participants or their trust in the research process or researcher. In the context of outdoor studies and framed by Kantian ethical and moral principles, this paper describes the "procedural ethics" of Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) and how our own moral and ethical positioning influences the planning for the opportunities, dilemmas and challenges of fieldwork, shaping the "ethics in practice" during research and in post-study reporting. From a sail training study, I describe the ethical and methodological dilemmas and the decisions made in respect of audio recording and the use of photo-elicitation; and the sense of uncertainty and unease stimulated by reflective and reflexive practice.

Institutional ethnography (IE) is a feminist approach to research focusing on the organising power of texts and language. This paper explores "how" to analyse texts in IE while considering the importance of reflexivity and accountability to feminist research. Based on a five year study of UK university audit processes, I developed a three-part IE text analysis approach which sits on a spectrum of closeness to the text(s) under analysis: (i) text -- close analysis of one text or a small array of texts; (ii) process -- mapping across a textually-mediated process and (iii) discourse -- identifying a textually mediated discourse. Additionally, I make three analytic points about how texts organise: the importance of reader interpretation (researchers and users of texts); the strategic multi-layered translation work done by readers to fit into institutions and anticipate readerships; and, the importance of non-readers who can make mythologised understandings of texts material through writing future texts.

Purpose: In this paper, the author reflects on her researcher experiences of attempting to construct co-productive epistemic relations in her ethnographic doctoral research about a gallery youth collective. The paper engages with debates about the nature of co-productive relations, advocating for a more affective approach which attends to multiple, temporary moments within the research, rather than seeking a grand or unified process of collaboration. Design/methodology/approach: This methodological paper draws on the records and reflections the author generated in the process of undertaking collaborative ethnographic research, considered with a specific theoretical resource (Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism (2011)) to construct a reflexive narrative from her doctoral research experiences. Findings: The paper discusses the multiple, shifting ways in which research relationships unfolded in the author's doctoral research and the impasse this generated in the author's understanding of desirable co-productive relations. Reflecting with Berlant's Cruel Optimism (2011) allowed the author to understand the COVID-19 crisis as the rupture of the author's attachment to this relational fantasy. Beyond this rupture, the author was able to more fully attend to fleeting, affective moments as a form of co-production within the research. Originality/value: The paper contributes to the growing anthology of critical and reflexive narratives about co-production; these collectively provide a resource for researcher reflection and for teaching about collaborative practices.

Instructing online has become an increasingly common aspect of a university lecturer's role. While research has developed an understanding of the student learning experience, less attention has been paid to the role of the lecturer. This study observed the practice of university lecturers teaching in a range of undergraduate degree programmes in the United Kingdom. The lecturers' purpose, pedagogy, and philosophy emerged in the dialogic patterns of the online space. Practice was shaped by the lecturers' epistemological positioning and their cultural values and beliefs. The practice, which was observed across different modules, reflected the different positions lecturers took when they approached online teaching. The research highlights the way in which a lecturers' purpose, pedagogy, and philosophy are reflected in their online facilitation.

This paper outlines the findings from a study that examined the tablet and app use of children aged from birth to three. The aim of the study was to examine how far use of tablets and apps promoted play and creativity. A total of 954 UK parents of children aged from birth to three who had access to a tablet in the home completed an online survey that explored the children's use of apps. Ethnographic case studies of four children aged from birth to three were undertaken in homes in order to explore in greater depth issues that emerged in the survey. The paper reports on the way in which the use of tablets promoted play and creativity across cognitive, physical social and cultural domains. The implications for policy and research are outlined.

This article examines (im)obility in the global visa regime through the experiences of a Global South academic working in the Global North. Drawing on an autoethnographic account of a visa application, this article outlines the ways in which the global visa regime negatively affects a Global South academic's life. Visa regulations constitute a particular Global South academic subject in the Global North, one whose academic career is characterised by uncertainty and anxiety, as visas can limit access to promotions and to fieldwork and research opportunities. Visa experiences can thus contribute to alienation and non-belonging of Global South scholars in academia, while impacting knowledge production and teaching.

This specially themed ""Getting of Wisdom," Learning in Later Life" Edition of the "Australian Journal of Adult Learning" ("AJAL") is not so much concerned with the issue of ageing itself, but more about quality of life regardless of age. It is about taking, but also giving back as best as possible at any age. This special issue is a result of the one week "The Getting of Wisdom Exchange", a collaboration between around 100 adult education practitioners and researchers from ten countries from Australia, New Zealand, Asia and Europe. In this issue, papers are presented from Sweden, Ireland, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia, Slovenia, Poland, Germany, Portugal and the United Kingdom. Papers cover different topics and open questions about various issues in older people's learning.

Type 2 Diabetes is both an incurable illness and a hidden disability that has reached epidemic proportions on a global scale. It has obviously spawned a huge clinical literature, but no scholarly accounts of learning to live with the illness on a daily basis from a feminist perspective. As an older woman, I have made use of a somewhat controversial autoethnographical approach to explore how far I consider myself empowered to live with, and manage this condition for the rest of my life. Self-management is an idea that is central to both the United Kingdom (UK) National Health Service (NHS) philosophy of supporting patient choice and within a feminist perspective on health care. Learning to identify, access and use the necessary resources to manage my condition suggests that there are regional differences within the UK as to how much practical care diabetes patients are offered or can access. The paternalistic nature of the health care team/patient relationship appears to militate against the concept of patient empowerment.

Academic literacy practices are increasingly varied, influenced by the diverse education and language backgrounds of students and staff, interdisciplinary approaches, and collaborations with non-university groups such as business partners. Completing a master's dissertation thus requires students to negotiate literacy practices associated with different domains. To enable an investigation of conditions for such negotiations, this article extends the concept of literacy practices by combining insights from Academic Literacies, New Literacy Studies and Schatzki's (1996) social practice ontology. The resulting framework is applied in a case study of a student who negotiates academic requirements and entrepreneurial goals in completing a master's dissertation.

This paper discusses feedback for developing L2 writing. It presents data from a serendipitous audio-recording of one L2 master's student's tutorial with her dissertation supervisor at a UK university, which is extracted from a 13-month linguistic ethnography. Following "academic literacies" scholars, I view the tutorial as a "literacy event" (Heath, 1982: 83), which, I argue, takes place in a "backstage" (Goffman, 1959) social learning space where student-teacher power relations and identities may be asymmetrical, contested, and fluid. In line with the tenets of linguistic ethnography (Copland and Creese, 2015: 13), the discourse analysis of the tutorial considers how the interaction here is "embedded in wider social contexts and structures." I identify dominant institutional discourses and discuss how these create power relations that interact with language, identities, and agency in the student's experience. These data are triangulated with post-recall interviews with the two participants, the dissertation draft with the lecturer's written feedback, the summative feedback, and course documents. Findings demonstrate that, while the student was interested in developing argumentation, the supervisor focused on other aspects. I relate this to recent literature on knowledge transformation and argumentation in academic writing, and discuss its implications for L2 master's students by drawing on Bourdieu's notion of "right to speak" (1991).

International students' identities are complex and so are their needs. Semi-structured interviews with 13 of the lead researcher's former students from Dubai, United Arab Emirates, who are multi-national, multi-lingual and pursuing degrees in law, business, economics, medicine, education, art and media, in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia elucidated this reality. Their experiences demonstrated scholastic and pabulum frustrations that were offset in part by constant communication with their clans in person and through various technologies. Though the current model of higher education often seeks to identify and categorize international students as a group, this study shows that international students are unique individuals. Recognizing their individuality, higher education institutions and policymakers can more appropriately respond to international students' needs.

This paper primarily discusses the methodology of a case study into interactions and working practices of an elearning team, on and offline. Although several ethnographies have been published on online learning, there are apparently none involving communities developing courses. This is a unique insight, bringing a new view of course and staff development. The e-learning team develops courses in the Faculty of Medical Sciences Graduate School in a UK higher education institution. Interactions occur online and offline, the team's workplace "setting". The ethnography is to inform future staff development by analysing interaction outside the team with the subject specialists, generally time-poor clinicians and research scientists who have varied experience of e-learning, but are required to provide course content and to teach their subjects in online distance learning courses. Records kept by team members were enlarged upon via weekly interviews and collated by a team member who developed a narrative, subsequently coded into content themes. The main themes were technology, pedagogy and communication. Conversation analysis provided theories on methods useful in staff development for later action research. Consideration was also given to issues of power within the interactional relationships. The paper discusses challenges and strengths of this collaborative self-ethnography as a research methodology in this e-learning setting. It was concluded that collaborative self-ethnography is a highly suitable research methodology for this type of study.

This essay suggests an alternative accountability process on the basis of critiques of current evaluation practice in higher education. Using cases in the British university system, with some international commentary and thinking through experience in Asian universities in four countries in the wake of 'audit culture', the work of Thorstein Bunde Veblen is revived. With Veblen, the current structures and mechanics of the corporate and fully-monetised university might once more be challenged. The risk of importing the metrics and audit culture of Britain, and the neoliberal managerialist administration-led university of North America, wholesale into Asian universities is questioned by acknowledgment that exiting hierarchies are persistent, and competing on Euro-American terms is a recipe for disaster. Due recognition is curtailed, hard work and standards are ignored, prospects for junior staff are constrained to a kind of intellectual and social penury. Resources based on research skills more robust than the current axiomatic research assessment calculus are suggested from within the university. The solution is not to emulate a declining system, but to innovate and invent new horizons and terms of engagement. The proposals offered here are only a suggestion for reflexive inquiry and informed self-examination--criticism-self-criticism from co-research sociology, ethnographic film and urban geography, among others--offered as alternate concurrent paths to accountability.

This article critically interrogates the model of language that underpins early years policy and pedagogy. Our arguments emerge from an ethnographic study involving 2-year-olds attending a day care centre that had begun to hold a substantial proportion of its sessions outdoors. The resultant shift in pedagogy coincided with changes in the children's speaking and listening practices. We take these changes as a starting point for a reconceptualisation of early language and the conditions under which it develops. Drawing on posthuman and Deleuzian theory, we propose a relational- material model of early language, which situates language within a wider, multi-sensory and more-than-human milieu, in which children are immersed from their earliest days. We end by asking whether early language development might be better supported by paying "less" attention to words, grammar and meaning, in favour of fostering participation in dynamic, multisensory, collective events.