Doing Fieldwork at Home: The Ethnography of Education in Familiar Contexts

This book engages readers via the international contributions from “home” field sites around the world and international authors. Importantly, the various chapters address a wide spectrum of educational contexts – ranging from higher education, to K-12 public and private schools, to prison schools. The realistic accounts portrayed in each of the chapters address how local collaborations are instantiated through the research process, from access and data collection to the write-up phases. The major themes that emerge across the chapters highlight 1) positionality and negotiation of multiple roles, i.e., researcher, educator, colleague, friend, community member; 2) reconciling multiple, hybrid, and intersectional identities with varying insider/outsider statuses vis-à-vis research participants; 3) resulting power dynamics in connection to relational identities – sometimes conflicting, consolidating, equalizing, and/or elevating; 4) innovative methodological responses to these dilemmas; and 5) integrated research designs and research ethics, offering possibilities for participation and insights on the social impact of research findings. Each of the book’s chapters thus individually and collectively treat and resolve local ways of doing home (field) work and highlight the creation and sharing of knowledge among researchers and research participants.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: In the Field at Home Loukia K. Sarroub and Claire Nicholas Chapter 1: Fieldworking at Home: Exploring the Experiences and Strategies of Student Nurses and Veterinary Students Vibeke Røn Noer and Camilla Kirketerp Nielsen Chapter 2: Identity, Positionality, and Discovery: Researching Race in Local Context Phillip Ryan and Mary Anne Poe Chapter 3: Can Basque be Protected in Multi-ethnic Environments? Methodological Dilemmas in Basque School Ethnography Elizabeth Pérez-Izaguirre Chapter 4: Insider to Outsider: From Teacher to Researcher in the Same School Context Tricia Gray Chapter 5: “You Pulled the Chair from Right Under Me!”: How a Young Man Disappears from a High School Reading Class Loukia K. Sarroub Chapter 6: Gaining Access to Students’ Informal Conversations with Peers: An Explorative Approach on Educational Research and Staging of Recording Devices Charlotta Rönn Chapter 7: Home and Away: Crafting an Engaged Ethnography of Textile and Entrepreneurship Training Claire Nicholas and Surin Kim Chapter 8: Collaborative Intersectionality in Researcher-Participant Relations at a Hispanic Serving Institution Jen Stacy Chapter 9: Being a Researcher-Teacher in an Action-Oriented School Research Project on Welding: Perspectives, Positions, and Ethical Dilemmas Stig-Börje Asplund, Nina Kilbrink, and Jan Axelsson Chapter 10: Teachers as Ethnographers in Schools: Research Dynamics at a Waldorf School in the Philippines Thijs Jan van Schie Chapter 11: The Familiar and the Foreign: The Schooling of System-Involved Youth Sarah Staples-Farmer Onward Loukia K. Sarroub Bibliography Author Biographies

About the Author :
Loukia K. Sarroub is professor of literacy studies and education & linguistics and chair of graduate programs in the Department of Teaching, Learning & Teacher Education at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she also has a courtesy professor appointment in the Department of Anthropology. Claire Nicholas is assistant professor of textiles and material culture in the Department of Textiles, Merchandising & Fashion Design at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Review :
his timely collection boldly engages new and fluid understandings of being in the "field" in "home" contexts. Drawing from the sustained ethnographic and theoretical work if its contributors, the book offers a critical global perspective on the enduring fieldwork tensions in education between distance and proximity (whether temporal or spatial), the role of teacher and researcher, and the complexities that arise when researchers committed to doing relational work within their own home fieldwork locations - the workplace, the university, the neighborhood, or the school -- must document, and, at times, interrupt the very social reproduction processes in which they participate. The authors in this volume inspire ways to renegotiate the meanings of home and fieldwork, but more importantly, they also intervene in the broader disciplinary field by advancing new ways to renegotiate the meaning and purpose of ethnographic inquiry. Doing Fieldwork at Home tackles an enduring question: how does educational ethnography change when it's done in contexts familiar to the researcher? This brilliant book, edited by veteran ethnographers Claire Nicholas and Loukia Sarroub, examines questions of positionality, intersectionality, epistemology, power dynamics, and ethics in ethnographic research. The chapters illuminate how 'home' is negotiated and 'strange-making' is sustained over the course of the research project. This provocative book provides key insights regarding the interconnected methodological, ethical, and analytical dilemmas of doing fieldwork at 'home.' This provocative book, which provides key insights regarding the interconnected methodological, ethical, and analytical dilemmas of doing fieldwork at 'home, ' will be of great interest to ethnographers, education studies scholars, and students in qualitative research courses. It is past time for ethnographers to be recognized for the work they do and the contributions they make "at home." This collection of chapters by ethnographers of education from around the world brings this subject to the fore, highlighting advantages and dilemmas of fieldwork at home; raising issues of positionality, collaboration, power, and methodology; and, introducing new avenues for ethnographic study and research in education and beyond. Where we conduct ethnographic fieldwork matters since it sets the template for the context that shapes who ethnographers interact with and what sorts of data one can and cannot access. This book helps frame what is meant by 'local contexts' and reflects on how studying the local as implications for ethnographers' methodological, analytical and ethical practices. A must read for anyone who is doing ethnography in a familiar setting.