Conference Agenda

Our symposium focuses on field relations, a classic and often discussed topic of ethnographic methodology. We explore the relationships we build as ethnographers in the field: concrete, tangible relationships with practitioners and other people in local sites. How do we initiate and form them, how do we nurture them, which meanings do we attribute to them – and which meanings do vice versa people in the field attribute to us and our projects? We also take a closer look at the notion of ‘relations’ and expand the subject beyond a narrow focus on human interaction. Ethnographers of all shades have continually stressed the importance of considering material relations, discursive relations, and power relations for producing rich and insightful ethnographies (Appadurai 1990, Marcus 1998, Desmond 2014). The ethnographic construction of scientific objects and research questions commonly relates to processes and practices, contacts and conflicts, doings and sayings (Schatzki 1996), entanglements (Haraway 2008, 20) and boundary-making, all of which occur in shifting configurations of relations.

Ethnography recognizes these shifting configurations in its field work strategies, and requests researchers to articulate the ways in which a social relation between ethnographer and participants is established. These social relations are massively formed by circulating ideologies and discourses, by materialities, technical opportunities, bodies and by non-human life present in the field. We ask: how are these processes of relationing interwoven with our research interests and the theoretical and methodological frameworks of our research? We also want to illuminate how the relationships in the field enable our insights and findings. We draw on a substantial body of work on ethnographic field work about relations and roles, and the challenges and opportunities they present. One prominent position is that of the ethnographer as a "professional stranger" (Agar 1996) whose analytical distance from the field makes the familiar strange (Delamont and Atkinson 1996), which also affects field relations and how they are shaped (Sieber Egger, Unterweger & Maeder 2019; Dennis 2010). Another position is rather represented in cultural and social anthropological ethnography, where ‘making the familiar strange’ is less an issue than truly understanding “other” forms of being in the world in their own terms (i.e. Strathern 2020).

Based on this exploration, we will discuss a series of questions that revolve around our multiple relationships in and with the field: How do we conceptualize field relationships with different field actors in terms of research interests and theoretical frameworks? How do the research interests affect our relationships with people in the field?

How pervasive and constitutive is the culture of the field – its set of possible roles, social positions, and social orders, but also its materiality, ideologies, discourses, practices – when trying to establish field relations, and how do we reflect this? What relationships could we establish and maintain in our projects, and what was their significance for the projects, but also within the diversity of other field relations? Asking questions like these we try to shed light on the complexity of the current thinking about establishing and maintaining field relations.

This presentation is based on the research project "Negotiating NatureChildhoods. An Ethnography of Relations with Nature in Kindergartens of the Anthropocene". We investigate how children build and entertain relations with their surroundings in the local common worlds of their kindergartens, how relational agency is established in interaction with the material, human and non-human world. In the traditional dichotomic western worldview, often-discussed as the nature-culture-gap (Latour 1993; Haraway 2008), younger children tend to be positioned on the side of "nature", whereby in their educational process and based on intensive contact with nature they are ultimately supposed to develop a "culture" of human responsibility towards the natural environment. Following recent developments in childhood theory with the posthumanist / neo-materialist common worlds concept (Taylor 2013, Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw 2019) though, relations of children with and within their environments are understood as profoundly shaped by materialities and "more-than-human"-connections. Accordingly, with the use of the common worlding concept, our research interest is directed more strongly towards the in-between of separations, towards the power of materiality and all connections of humans and more-than-humans which repeatedly transgress these dichotomic orders. Our talk revolves firstly around the question of how these "entanglements" (Haraway 2008) of people/children, objects, plants, animals, meanings and spaces in the process of becoming (composed) together (Latour 2011) can be captured, and how the relationship between childhood and nature can be discussed from this perspective. Secondly, following the idea of the symposium to shed light on the enactment of relationships in the field, we want to take a close look on the relationships between field participants and researchers through the lens of the common worlds concept. This means that we see these relations evolving out of a process of relationing in which, according to Marilyn Strathern (2020, 3), relations are ‘held in place by relations’. We specifically look at how materialities and people, but also ideas and non-human beings come into play when we as researchers try to form and manage our relationships with the researched. We see our task in tracing these relations, or rather webs of relations. Methodologically, we are guided by the approach as described by George Marcus (1995) in his classic text: “Follow the people / thing / metaphor / story …”, by quite literally following connections and putative relationships (Marcus 1995, 97), also within one local field, and not (as was Marcus’ concern in the 1990ies) in a multi-sited setting.

Haraway, Donna Jeanne. 2008. When Species Meet. Posthumanities 3. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Übersetzt von Catherine Porter. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno. 2011. «Il n’y a pas de monde commun. Il faut le composer». Multitudes 45 (2): 38–41. Marcus, George E. 1995. «Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography». Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 95–117. Strathern, Marilyn. 2020. Relations: an anthropological account. Durham: Duke University Press. Taylor, Affrica. 2013. Reconfiguring the Natures of Childhood. Routledge. Taylor, Affrica, und Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw. 2019. The Common Worlds of Children and Animals. Relational Ethics for Entangled Lives. London, New York: Routledge.

Video diaries enable ethnographers to build relationships of trust with participants, because they create empathic encounters between ethnographers and participants (Pink 2017). In our project on the professional development of teachers, video diaries created encounters with teachers and their entanglements with teaching, reflecting institutional roles, personal professional values, and the processes in which these aspects are negotiated. This paper elaborates on what we have found to be three core elements of our video diary approach (Wieser 2015): (1) Video diaries decenter participants as objects of inquiry through technological means, and create a space for self-representation in which participants can actively document their lives (Bates 2013). Video diaries can be described as “unselective inscription devices” (Pinchevski 2012), which capture streams of consciousness over time, but also tacit knowing beyond consciousness (Zundel et al. 2018). Even though researchers remain co-producers of video diaries, participants gain autonomy with respect to the focus they set in their diaries, which allows researchers to co-experience the often open, leaky, and emergent entanglements of practice. (2) Video diaries give insights into the tacit experiences of participants within the continuous flow of everyday life. While conventional fieldwork strategies such as casual conversations and interviewing give participants a vis-à-vis, video diaries create a more private space of sharing, and may provide a channel to say what cannot be said in social encounters (Cashmore et al. 2010). Video diaries thus allow insights into private spheres, and into fragments of the self that are revealed through glimpses into homes, private workspaces, or gardens, in which participants process experiences and relate their selves to professional decisions. (3) Video diaries create a way of empathizing with participants, becoming closely familiar with their point of view beyond observing and participating (Jones 2015). Empathising here refers to the generative outcome of a relationship of trust with participants that was built over time through an affective engagement with their experiences and perspectives. Video diaries create continual communication with participants, across fields, and give access to unmitigated comments on field relations and tensions, in which teachers can elaborate on their professional roles. The presentation draws on our fieldwork experiences and theoretical reflections on video diaries to initiate a conversation on the benefits and possibilities and risks of video diaries and their possible uses in educational ethnography.

Bates, Charlotte. 2013. «Video Diaries: Audio-Visual Research Methods and the Elusive Body». Visual Studies 28 (1): 29–37. Cashmore, Annette, Paul Green, und Jon Scott. 2010. «An ethnographic approach to studying the student experience: The student perspective through free form video diaries. A Practice Report». The International Journal of the First Year in Higher Education 1 (1): 106–11. Jones, R.L., J. Fonseca, L. De Martin Silva, G. Davies, K. Morgan, und I. Mesquita. 2015. «The Promise and Problems of Video Diaries: Building on Current Research». Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health 7 (3): 395–410. Pinchevski, Amit. 2012. «The Audiovisual Unconscious: Media and Trauma in the Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies». Critical Inquiry 39 (1): 142–66. Pink, Sarah, Shanti Sumartojo, Deborah Lupton, und Christine Heyes LaBond. 2017. «Empathetic Technologies: Digital Materiality and Video Ethnography». Visual Studies 32 (4): 371–81. Wieser, Clemens. 2015. «Technology and Ethnography – Will It Blend? Technological Possibilities for Fieldwork on Transformations of Teacher Knowledge with Videography and Video Diaries». Seminar.Net - International Journal of Media, Technology and Lifelong Learning 11 (3): 223–34. Zundel, Mike, Robert MacIntosh, und David Mackay. 2018. «The Utility of Video Diaries for Organizational Research». Organizational Research Methods 21 (2): 386–411.

Situated in the wider framework of an ethnographic research project on multilingualism in preschools in the officially trilingual region of South Tyrol (Italy), this paper focuses on the role of language(s) and multilingualism in field relations. Theoretically, it combines critical educational and sociolinguistic theories on language and power. In these theories, language is understood as “ideology and practice” (Heller 2007), and as a socially and institutionally situated practice which can (re)produce, negotiate, shift or irritate powerful relations between speakers. Methodologically, it consistently links ethnographic and sociolinguistic approaches (Blackledge/Creese 2010; Tusting 2020). In South Tyrol, there are three separate educational systems, each with one of the officially recognized languages (Italian, German, Ladin) as main language of instruction. It has been shown that educational spaces set up for the protection of a recognized linguistic minority have to strike a balance between the protection of the minority group by which they are legitimated, and the need for inclusive and equitable education for all, including speakers of the majority language and speakers of languages of migration (Heller 2011: 12). In South Tyrol, the presence of differently linguistically minoritized individuals and groups leads to a “hierarchization of educational rights of minorities” (Thoma 2022), which also plays a role in ethnographic research in general and for field relations more specifically. Not least for this reason, South Tyrol is a particularly interesting site to study how language becomes relevant both in the educational system and in ethnographic research. Since field relations, especially in multilingual migration societies, are strongly framed by language ideologies and language policies, it is crucial to understand the connections between different language policies and the language ideologies behind them. The paper combines fieldnotes and transcripts of interviews to reconstruct how language policies and ideologies impact field relations and how they are (re)produced, negotiated, or irritated in interactions. Special attention will be paid to the linguistic repertoires and language choices of the researchers (Gallego-Balsà 2020) and how they are relevant to reveal power in field relations.

Blackledge, Adrian; Creese, Angela (2010): Multilingualism: a critical perspective. London: Continuum. Gallego-Balsà Lídia (2020): Language Choice and Stance in a Multilingual Ethnographic Fieldwork. Applied Linguistics Review 11(2): 233–250. Heller, Monica (2007): Bilingualism as Ideology and Practice. In: Heller, Monica (Ed.): Bilingualism: A Social Approach. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1–22. Heller Monica (2011): Paths to post-nationalism: A critical ethnography of language and identity. New York: Oxford University Press. Knoll, Alex (2016): “Kindergarten as a Bastion. On the Discursive Construction of a Homogeneous Speech Community and National Identity.” Zeitschrift für Diskursforschung (2): 137–53. Thoma, Nadja (2022): The Hierarchization of Educational Rights of Minorities. A Critical Analysis of Discourses on Multilingualism in South Tyrolean Preschools. In: Zeitschrift für erziehungswissenschaftliche Migrationsforschung, 02/2022, 134-150. https://doi.org/10.3224/zem.v1i2.04 Tusting, Karin (2020): The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Ethnography. Milton Park: Routledge.

This symposium, in two parts, reports on city-based teams forging a multi-cities ethnography focussed on child poverty and the challenges for schooling future generations. This takes a cue from a local place-based action study on Trem y Mynydd, the pseudonym given to a housing estate adjacent to the city of Bangor in Wales. The first set of four papers discusses the ethnographic approach forged on Trem y Mynydd in the face of damage done by de-industrialisation, unemployment, exploitation of the working poor, Universal Credit, benefit cuts and Brexit, to focus on children’s lived experiences of poverty. The second set of four papers interrogates this ethnographic work and the ways it might inform other city-based teams with a view to inter-connecting across international borders with the express purpose of raising a common voice on what is required of research-informed schools/social policies, ostensibly a hallmark of democratic governments.

The action study on Trem y Mynydd was initiated by a Welsh Government sponsored Children First needs assessment, which was conducted in 2017-2018 (see Lewis, 2023). Lewis, who won the contract after submitting a competitive tender, interrogated publically available data and then embarked on fieldwork to identify needs but also the strengths and assets of the local geographically defined school-community. In her endeavour to engage in critical analyses of both quantitative and qualitative data, Lewis organised a multi-agency group of workers employed on the estate and invited academic partners, who recognised her work as a first ethnographic sketch of the lived experiences of child poverty.

As Lewis’s fixed-term work drew to a close, the group made it clear that given the findings, they did not want to disband and called for further research. This provoked a core group to reconvene as the Bangor Poverty and Learning in Urban Schools (PLUS) team of school staff, multi-agency workers and academic partners along with resident families and critical friends. Lewis also joined this team, who continued to meet in two series of six monthly seminars (2019-2020) geared to mentor and support participants to become research-active, all sponsored by Professor Carl Hughes (Bangor University). At the outset they agreed on a twin purpose: to follow through on the needs assessment and work towards an ‘ethnography that makes a difference’ (see Mills and Morton, 2013), which included critical discussion of definitions of child poverty and human rights, inspired by former UN Special Rapporteur Philip Alston’s (2018) probe into Extreme Poverty in the UK, which involved Wales.

They also resolved to contribute to a multi-cities ethnography, which was then being planned to include four cities in the UK, apropos a recommendation from the BERA Research Commission on Poverty and Policy Advocacy (2017-2019), and four in Australia given liaison with the AARE Equity network. While those eight city-based teams made good progress towards coordination, the first Covid lockdown in early 2020 put paid to that project. The Bangor PLUS team re-grouped in early 2021 and proceeded to develop a school-community-university partnership that gave rise to a participatory ethnography as a model way of working in Wales, recognised as a small European nation-state that espouses a social democratic social imaginary, which in some portfolios contrasts markedly to consecutive UK Westminster governments' neoliberal project. This is all showcased in Beckett’s (2023) edited book to be launched at conference, while the task for this two-part symposium is to explore the possibility of a research partnership in a multi-cities ethnography, inviting other city-based teams active in school-communities to join: building clout on child poverty, sharing insights, synchronising findings, joining forces and ultimately lobbying through our networks including the ECER, ACER, the OECD, UN and UNESCO.

This paper sets the scene for critical discussion of the Bangor Poverty and Learning in Urban Schools (PLUS) team’s place-based action study to date in a school-community on the Trem y Mynydd housing estate, to use its pseudonym, to push back against child poverty, especially its ongoing influence on schooling success. Concerned to realise an ‘ethnography that makes a difference’ (see Mills and Morton, 2013), it opens with some points for debate about the relationship between scholarship and politics, notably Hammersley’s (2000) concerns about research and its neutrality. It is informed by our compilation of case stories (see Beckett, 2023) but also shared ideas about inequality, social exclusion, unmet needs, values, powerlessness and degraded life chances (see Child Poverty Action Group, 2017, p.2). As CPAG noted, how you define it has a lot to do with what you think ought to be done about it. This paper is concerned with poverty and values, notably Piachaud’s view that poverty carries a moral imperative that something should be done, and Alcock’s view that poverty is a political concept that implies action to remedy it (see Piachaud, 1981, and Alcock, 1993, both cited by Child Poverty Action Group, 2017, p.22). Our sober approach in seeking to influence government decisions about schools/social policies can be aligned to the ‘worldly ambitions’ named by Mills and Morton (2013, p.142). This is both necessary and problematic going by Ball’s mapping of the new transnational policy networks and their connections (see Ball, 2008; Nambissan and Ball, 2010; both cited by Mills and Morton, 2013, p.142). It is evident in the tensions between successive UK government neoliberal policy choices like de-industrialisation, austerity and Brexit and devolved Welsh governments’ social democratic policies such as the 2015 Well-being and Future Generations (Wales) Act, the 2018 Children First needs assessment, and the 2022 Curriculum for Wales. This complex policy field, underpinned by party political ideology, requires concerted efforts to strengthen participatory and collaborative approaches to democratise policies, their roll-out and resourcing, all built on a constructive analysis of the present, including the history in the present, and of possible and probable futures. These efforts are strengthened by synchronising with other city-based teams working in school-communities voicing the practical-political realities of child poverty charted in their own localities, sharing values, findings and research intelligence about their respective cultural, political, and social contexts. Of interest are local solutions prefiguring national systemic and structural changes.

Child Poverty Action Group (2017). Poverty: The Facts. Ivinson, G., Thompson, I., Beckett, L., Wrigley, T. Egan, D., Leitch R., & McKinney, S. (2018) The research commission on poverty and policy advocacy A report from one of the BERA Research Commissions BERA available online at: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/132212039.pdf Ivinson & Thompson (2020) Poverty and Education Across the UK. Bristol: Policy Press. LappaLainen, S., Hakala, K., Lahelma, E., Mietola, R., Niemi, A.M., Sallo, U.M., and Tolonen, T. (2022) Feminist ethnography as ‘Troublemaker’ in educational research: analysing barriers of social justice. Ethnography and Education, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17457823.2022.2122855 Mills, D. & Morton, M. (2013). Ethnography in Education Sage Thompson, Ivinson, Beckett, Egan, Leitch, McKinney (2017) Learning the Price of Poverty across the UK. Policy Futures in Education, 16, 2, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1478210317736224

This paper describes a research initiative conducted in 2021- 2022 with the Queensland Department of Education, Australia that resulted in an evidence-based practice framework to complement ACER’s National School Improvement Tool (2016). The initiative focussed on the importance of the relationship between student wellbeing and engagement and learning success ensuring all students make good progress. It was driven by a persistent policy and practice challenge regarding inequality and poor educational outcomes for a growing number of students, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic (Masters, Fraillon, Taylor-Guy & Chase, 2020; Dabrowski, Nietsche, Taylor-Guy & Chase, 2020) and real concerns that the most vulnerable learners in the education system would be forever lost as a result of school closures (Watterson & O’Connell, 2019). Whilst poverty was not a major focus of the project, there are indications from our work in school improvement over a decade that poverty can be contributory and/or risk factor in disengagement from schooling and poor wellbeing outcomes. What is certainly clear is that wellbeing and engagement interventions can make a difference. Everything schools do to support student wellbeing counts, but some strategies are more effective than others. Student wellbeing has been defined as: “a sustainable state of positive mood and attitude, resilience, and satisfaction with self, relationships and experiences at school”. (Fredricks, Blumenfeld, & Paris, 2004). Broadly speaking, this is a concept that covers a holistic range of psychological, physical, social, spiritual and cognitive dimensions. Research identifies that student engagement is multi-faceted, consisting of three domains: cognitive engagement, including motivation to learn and resilience and persistence to achieve; emotional engagement, including the nature of a student’s relationship with learning, and connectedness to others; and behavioural engagement, including a student’s level of participation in all areas of schooling, including academic, social and extracurricular activities (Dix, Carslake, Sniedze-Gregory et al., 2020).. Importantly, a student’s level of engagement is not a ‘fixed state’ and will respond to external factors such as their relationships and classroom environments. Sustained interventions are needed to impact academic outcomes and disadvantaged students benefit most from tailored support. This paper concludes with the suggestion that this initiative could provide a template for a city-wide study of child poverty, as it relates to wellbeing and student engagement although this remains relatively under theorised. By drawing together propositions around the research/practice nexus in relation to child poverty in the Brisbane context, it sketches a possible contribution to a multi-cities ethnography.

ACER’s National School Improvement Tool (2016) https://research.acer.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1019&context=tll_misc Masters, G., Taylor-Guy, P., Fraillon, J., Chase, A. (2020) Ministerial Briefing Paper on Evidence of the Likely Impact on Educational Outcomes of Vulnerable Children Learning at Home during COVID-19. Australian Government Department of Education, Skills and Employment. https://research.acer.edu.au/learning_processes/24/ Dabrowski, A., Nietschke, Y., Taylor-Guy, P., & Chase, A. (2020). Mitigating the impacts of COVID-19: Lessons from Australia in remote education. Australian Council for Educational Research. https://doi.org/10.37517/978-1-74286-618-5 Dix, K., Ahmed, S. K., Carslake, T., Sniedze-Gregory, S., O’Grady, E., & Trevitt, J. (2020). Student health and wellbeing: A systematic review of intervention research examining effective student wellbeing in schools and their academic outcomes. Main report and executive summary. Evidence for Learning. https://www.evidenceforlearning.org.au/assets/Uploads/Main-Report-Student-Health-and-Wellbeing-Systematic-Review-FINAL-25-Sep-2020.pdf Fredricks, J.A., Blumenfeld, P.C., & Paris, A.H. (2004) School Engagement: Potential of the Concept, State of the Evidence. Review of Educational Research. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543074001059 Watterson & O’Connell (2019) Those who disappear: The Australian education problem nobody wants to talk about. https://education.unimelb.edu.au/mgse-industry-reports/report-1-those-who-disappear

This paper highlights the assets-based community development perspective we brought to working with the Bangor PLUS team following up on the Welsh Government’s Children First needs assessment on the Trem y Mynydd housing estate, to use its pseudonym (see Thirsk, 2023; Silvester and Joslin, 2023). We are adamant this means working with and supporting local resident families and children as a matter of principle (a better way of working) as well as a way to ameliorate some of the child poverty effects by improving health and well-being in the local community (through an empowering and sustainable way of working). We also share the view that as the cost of living crisis bites harder, notably over this last winter, those in poverty are disproportionately carrying the greater burden and suffering the most. This paper expounds an argument for community development workers being part of the Bangor PLUS team, which connects with a more ethnographic approach to co-producing local knowledge (see Banks et al, 2019) about this school-community. The aim is to hammer home the point that the local community be given mentoring and support on their terms to, firstly, define and critically understand their needs, assets and strengths, then the challenges facing them, and finally to co-develop local solutions to the challenges. These processes, especially ownership of the local solutions, is where school staff and academic partners prove useful, linking to external expertise, resources and support. Here the focus is on our working with them to help identify children’s learning needs, the circumstances that impact on children’s futures, and what is required to ensure the goals for their health and well-being but also their prosperity (see Welsh Government, 2015, 2019). This means connecting with the local community, including those who can help deliver our identified local solutions to child poverty, as they too can positively impact upon children’s experience of schooling and education and ultimately employment and training. For example, the Hive community garden and café, growing food and serving it up (via volunteers) to families, has seen children embracing new ideas about food production and supply. This way of working would of course also potentially strengthen the school’s relationship with resident families, their elected representatives, multi-agency workers, and beyond into government as this in itself can bring several benefits to supporting the school’s aims. We conclude with what it really takes to forge a city-based team for a multi-cities ethnography.

Albon, D. & Huf, C. (2021) What matters in early childhood education and care? The contribution of ethnographic research, Ethnography and Education, 16:3, 243-247, DOI: 10.1080/17457823.2021.1916978 Banks, S., Hart, A., Pahl, K., and Ward, P. (2019) Co-producing research. A community development approach. Bristol: Policy Press. Silvester, J. M. & Joslin, P. (2023) Hungry kids: families’ food insecurity further exposed by the pandemic in Beckett, L. (ed) Child poverty in Wales: Exploring the challenges for schooling future generations University of Wales press: Cardiff Thirsk, G. (2023) ‘It takes a Village’ to realise school-community development in Beckett, L. (ed) Child poverty in Wales: Exploring the challenges for schooling future generations University of Wales press: Cardiff

This symposium, in two parts, reports on city-based teams forging a multi-cities ethnography focussed on child poverty and the challenges for schooling future generations. This takes a cue from a local place-based action study on Trem y Mynydd, the pseudonym given to a housing estate adjacent to the city of Bangor in Wales. The first set of four papers discusses the ethnographic approach forged on Trem y Mynydd in the face of damage done by de-industrialisation, unemployment, exploitation of the working poor, Universal Credit, benefit cuts and Brexit, to focus on children’s lived experiences of poverty. The second set of four papers interrogates this ethnographic work and the ways it might inform other city-based teams with a view to inter-connecting across international borders with the express purpose of raising a common voice on what is required of research-informed schools/social policies, ostensibly a hallmark of democratic governments.

The action study on Trem y Mynydd was initiated by a Welsh Government sponsored Children First needs assessment, which was conducted in 2017-2018 (see Lewis, 2023). Lewis, who won the contract after submitting a competitive tender, interrogated publically available data and then embarked on fieldwork to identify needs but also the strengths and assets of the local geographically defined school-community. In her endeavour to engage in critical analyses of both quantitative and qualitative data, Lewis organised a multi-agency group of workers employed on the estate and invited academic partners, who recognised her work as a first ethnographic sketch of the lived experiences of child poverty.

As Lewis’s fixed-term work drew to a close, the group made it clear that given the findings, they did not want to disband and called for further research. This provoked a core group to reconvene as the Bangor Poverty and Learning in Urban Schools (PLUS) team of school staff, multi-agency workers and academic partners along with resident families and critical friends. Lewis also joined this team, who continued to meet in two series of six monthly seminars (2019-2020) geared to mentor and support participants to become research-active, all sponsored by Professor Carl Hughes (Bangor University). At the outset they agreed on a twin purpose: to follow through on the needs assessment and work towards an ‘ethnography that makes a difference’ (see Mills and Morton, 2013), which included critical discussion of definitions of child poverty and human rights, inspired by former UN Special Rapporteur Philip Alston’s (2018) probe into Extreme Poverty in the UK, which involved Wales.

They also resolved to contribute to a multi-cities ethnography, which was then being planned to include four cities in the UK, apropos a recommendation from the BERA Research Commission on Poverty and Policy Advocacy (2017-2019), and four in Australia given liaison with the AARE Equity network. While those eight city-based teams made good progress towards coordination, the first Covid lockdown in early 2020 put paid to that project. The Bangor PLUS team re-grouped in early 2021 and proceeded to develop a school-community-university partnership that gave rise to a participatory ethnography as a model way of working in Wales, recognised as a small European nation-state that espouses a social democratic social imaginary, which in some portfolios contrasts markedly to consecutive UK Westminster governments' neoliberal project. This is all showcased in Beckett’s (2023) edited book to be launched at conference, while the task for this two-part symposium is to explore the possibility of a research partnership in a multi-cities ethnography, inviting other city-based teams active in school-communities to join: building clout on child poverty, sharing insights, synchronising findings, joining forces and ultimately lobbying through our networks including the ECER, ACER, the OECD, UN and UNESCO.

This paper is by a Training and Business Development Manager and a Board member of an incorporated company now known as NCU CLG (NCU) Training, which traces its origins back to an Unemployment Action Group founded in 1983. This not-for-profit educational organisation provides Quality and Qualifications Ireland (QQI) certified training programs on the National Framework of Qualifications of Ireland (NFQ) for those who self-identify as marginalised or low-paid workers in both the local and the extended community. The aim is to support them in finding gainful employment and becoming self-sufficient to counter poverty and unemployment, irrespective of schooling and education. The ethos that guides NCU Training is that all members of the society, regardless of circumstance, are entitled to quality education, training and access to quality, well-paid jobs. Its series of training programs is recognised as a local solution to a widespread and long-standing problem of unemployment in Ireland going back to the 1980s when the emigration of college graduates who left to find work and further training opportunities soared to 30 percent. The contemporary situation is favourably different, but the need for a series of short-term courses remains. The paper begins with two collaborative case stories of different and diverse participants’ encounters with formal schooling, which had a deep and lasting impression that shaped their life paths. These are ethnographic accounts constructed as creative portraits, which bring photos, drawings, poems and song lyrics among other resources to make it real (see Lawrence-Lightfoot, 1983, cited by Mills and Morton, 2013, p.88). It then does some backward mapping to tease out their lived experiences of child poverty and the ways this impacted not only on schooling but subsequently. Taking another cue from Mills and Morton (2013, p.3), telling this story is a deeply humanistic endeavour with the twofold intention of creating knowledge about the experience of being unemployed and charting educative actions in response to the challenges. It proceeds with an analysis of some causes for concern in Irish politics, culture and society (Higgins, 2007), which lends itself to policy debates about schooling, notably the complexities of the educational and social worlds of those who are in positions of weakness. While this work in Dublin has the potential to plug into a city-based team and provide a contribution to a multi-cities ethnography, this paper concludes by charting the work to be done to make it happen (see Hughes, 2023).

Higgins, M.D. (2007) Causes for Concern. Irish Politics, Culture and Society. Dublin: Liberty Press. Hughes, E. (2023) School Heads: Enacting school-community development in response to child poverty in Beckett, L. (ed) Child poverty in Wales: Exploring the challenges for schooling future generations University of Wales press: Cardiff Lawrence-Lightfoot, S. (1983) The Good High School. Portraits of Character and Culture. New York: Basic Books. McInch, A. (2020) The only way is ethics: methodological considerations for a working-class academic, Ethnography and Education, 15:2, 254-266, DOI: 10.1080/17457823.2019.1631868 Mills, D. & Morton, M. (2013). Ethnography in Education Sage OECD (2022) The New OECD Jobs Strategy. How does Ireland compare? https://www.oecd.org/ireland/jobs-strategy-IRELAND-EN.pdf

The purpose of the paper is to interrogate the 2015 Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act as a trigger for policy debates on how schools could address the consequences of child poverty on learning engagement and wellbeing. We relate this to a case study in Queensland, Australia, investigating how school leaders and teachers conceptualise and support student wellbeing. We firstly articulate a professional concern Australian educators have with child poverty: what they understand of it and how they respond. In turn this builds a critical understanding of the effects of de-industrialisation and austerity on schooling and of the Global Educational Reform Movement or GERM (Sahlberg, 2015), which means developing a sharp acknowledgment in their professional work of how the GERM shapes the everyday experiences and demands of schooling with devastating consequences for children and their families living with poverty. The case study presented here was initially concerned with Australian wellbeing policy triggers and school leadership decisions behind student well-being and learning engagement in two schools in one coastal community. These schools were grappling with changing demographics and re-gentrification of the school-community, a challenge for providers of public education for children of families who are predominantly key workers. The data from interviews between the authors and school leaders lent itself to analyses informed by Basil Bernstein’s (1990; 1996) concepts of rules and fields, particularly recontextualization, recognition and realisation, but the task here is to return to what and how educators in Australia can learn from the 2015 Well-being legislation in Wales. This all plugs into a wider Brisbane city-based case study, which makes for a rich contribution from the Australian contingent to the multi-cities ethnography project (Beckett, 2023; Whatman et al, 2019). There is much to be learned from international partners featured in this symposium given their professional commitment to educative responses to child poverty, which in turn helps further develop responsive/educative work in Australian school wellbeing.

Australian Council of Social Services. (2022). Poverty in Australia 2022: A snapshot. University of New South Wales. https://povertyandinequality.acoss.org.au/a-snapshot-of-poverty-in-australia-2022/ Beckett, L. (2023). Child poverty in Wales: Exploring the challenges for schooling future generations. University of Wales Press. Bernstein, B. (2000). Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity: Theory, Research, Critique. Revised Edition. Rowman and Littlefield. Davidson, J. (2020). #futuregen: Lessons from a small country. London: Chelsea Green Publishing. Dix, K., Ahmed, S.K., Sniedze-Gregory, S., Carslake, T., & Trevitt, J. (2020). Effectiveness of school-based wellbeing interventions for improving academic outcomes in children and young people: A systematic review protocol. Australian Council for Educational Research. Masschelein, J., & Simons, M. (2013). In defence of the school: A public issue. Translated by Jack McMartin. E-ducation, Culture and Society Publishers. Sahlberg, P. (2012) How GERM is infecting schools around the world? https://pasisahlberg.com/ Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group (TEMAG). (2015). Action Now, Classroom Ready Teachers Report. Department of Education, Australian Government. World Health Organisation (WHO)(2021). Making every school a health promoting school: Global indicators and standards. Author. Wrigley, T., Lingard, B., & Thomson, P. (2012). Pedagogies of transformation: keeping hope alive in troubled times. Critical studies in Education, 53(1), 98-10.

This paper describes how recent education reform in Wales has supported a culture of collaborative working in schools, which is one of the characteristic features of the Bangor Poverty and Learning in Urban Schools (PLUS) project. It begins with work done with schools across North Wales to improve the uptake and impact of research and evidence use in schools given the current ‘social partnership’ policymaking agenda. Through Welsh Government’s 2021 National Strategy for Education Research and Enquiry, education professionals have been tasked with the challenge of moving education in Wales to a more research and evidence-informed system. We are guided by Thomson, Lingard and Wrigley’s (2012) unifying theme of, ideas for practice at systemic, policy, school and pedagogic levels, and Fullan’s (2023) idea of internal system drivers to enable better quality decision making and outcomes for disadvantaged learners such as those in the Trem y Mynydd and other school communities across Wales. However, we are only just beginning to know how we might encourage teachers to become research-active and get evidence into action in schools while the debate itself is often represented through polarised camps (Hammersley, 2009, 2015; Thomas, 2016, 2021; Pegram et al., 2022). It is within this contentious policy and practice space that we will describe our work with Welsh Government to evaluate how a network of schools serving disadvantaged communities worked with researchers and the regional school improvement service through the Embedding Research and Enquiry in Schools (EREiS) project. We explore how moves toward a more research-active, evidence-informed and ultimately evidence-based system (Owen et al, 2022) can be set within a progressive policy context that fosters greater teacher agency where intellectual responsibilities are successfully transferred to schools (Priestley, 2015). We present survey and interview findings gathered from schools, and explain how our work offers useful insights to help school leaders develop the professional knowledge to identify ‘best bets’ to improve learner outcomes rather than ideas and approaches being imposed through policy compliance measures. We conclude with some reflections on the worth of this research partnership in a multi-cities ethnography, especially as it provides us with the opportunity to further strengthen our knowledge of how schools can realise the ‘evidence revolution’ through social partnership. For example, the work in Dublin and Brisbane alert us to emerging findings that also identified similar features that need to be in place, which lends weight to our further calls on Welsh Government.

Fullan’s (2023) idea of internal system drivers Hammersley, 2009, 2015 Lunneblad, J. (2020) The value of poverty: an ethnographic study of a school–community partnership, Ethnography and Education, 15:4, 429-444, DOI: 10.1080/17457823.2019.1689518 Owen et al (2022) Pegram et al (2022) Priestley (2015) Thomas, 2016, 2021; Thomson, Lingard and Wrigley (2012) Changing Schools. Alternative ways to make a world of difference. London: Routledge. Rizvi and Lingard (2009) Globalising Education Policy.

This proposal is a part of an ongoing project that concerns educational institutions in Swedish rural societies, with focus on digitization and entrepreneurship. Even though almost half of the population worldwide still live in rural societies (43% in 2021 according to Statista, 2022) there is lack of research concerning rural societies and rural education in comparison to research on city areas and educational institutions in those areas (Åberg-Bengtsson, 2009; Beach et al, 2019). This spare interest from research communities, and/or, from governmental institutions contributing with research grants, may of course have many explanations. Huge capital is generated in metropolitan areas, high status educational institutions are located there, and the political decisions are made within the larger cities. To this should be added the prejudgment views on rural communities and their citizens – particularly on the rural working class – exploited and transferred over the world via the dominating urban-centric middleclass media culture Walker-Gibbs, Ludecke, & Kline, 2015, 2018). The metro-centric cultures lack of concern for the less urbanized part of the world, are also seen in the often simplistic understanding of “rural” and “rural education” (Bagley and Hillyard, 2014; Beach et al, 2019; Their et al, 2021). ”The challenge for all rural research is how rural is defined” says Walker-Gibbs, Ludecke, & Kline (2018).

In research on the field “rural education” heterogeneous and context-dependent nature of rurality are empathized (Nelson et al 2021). Rural areas present a great diversity among them in terms of social, cultural, religious, economic as well as topographical characteristics both within and across countries (Showalter et al., 2017). On the other hand, it is well known that rural youth to lesser extent then their urban counterpart is prone to complete a college degree, but that does not mean a complete absence of factors in smaller rural communities that can be helpful for rural youth in relation to their future ambitions (Roberts & Grant, 2021; see also, Beach et al, 2019). It has been argued that teachers have greater opportunities to provide support for and information on students’ postsecondary options in rural areas then in non-rural ones. However, while teachers and school personal staff do influence, and support, their rural students, research also show that this support is often inadequate for helping students enact the necessary steps for achieving their postsecondary ambitions (Roberts & Grant, 2021).

With Massey (1994) we argue that social relations are what construct space, and therefore, particular social relations – stretched over time, with its politics, culture and its history – is what makes up a particular space. In our case this means that we view our particular rural social spaces as imbedded in the relational life of the school, and in the same time as stretched out over the world via the continuing digitalization. Our research sites are three rural municipalities. We focus on one elementary school at each research site.

We concentrate on the places for education, in the era of digital tools, and possibilities for the schools and the communities to educate children and at the same time work with entrepreneurship, beneficial for the individuals as well as for the communities (Pettersson, 2018). Entrepreneurship in this project builds on the idea of relationships and mutual concerns as starting points for developing and acting on opportunities in diverse contexts (Berglund & Johannisson, 2012; Weicht & Jónsdóttir, 2021). The aim in this paper is to analyze and exemplify school-work and their local surroundings in relation to classroom work as well as to the social organization at the school with particular focus on entrepreneurship in the digital era.

We discuss how an ethnographic approach allowed us to describe and analyze cases of interdisciplinary educational practices that recently took shape in Belgian Flemish secondary schools after an educational reform.

Since 2019, secondary education in Flanders is being gradually reformed (Flemish Ministry of Education and Training, 2023). In particular, this reform stimulates interdisciplinarity in a diversity of forms and gives individual schools a lot of freedom in how to organize the concrete realization of the curriculum in a specific school. While mandatory learning goals before the reform where listed under well-defined school subjects that had to be implemented as such, legal learning requirements are now listed as groups of competencies not anymore associated to the obligation to organize learning based on specific school subjects. As a result, Flemish schools today can choose to work with traditional school subjects, interdisciplinary clusters, projects, seminars or other organizations of learning. In this context, in the last years a multitude of school-based, interdisciplinary practices with an experimental character arose in Flemish secondary schools.

While seminal papers in the literature classified at theoretical level the many ways in which interdisciplinary curricula can be constructed and organized combining elements from different subjects (Fogarty, 1991) and how this shapes instruction (Lederman & Niess, 1997) (Nikitina, 2006), the recent changes in the Flemish secondary school system suggest a different perspective: to consider interdisciplinarities as complex and diverse educational practices, to be studied as such by suitable research approaches and methods.

Engaging in ethnography in educational contexts, considered to be interdisciplinary by local school actors, allowed us to experience, describe and analyze interdisciplinarities as practices in today’s modernized secondary schools.

Ethnographic approaches in interdisciplinary educational contexts have been previously used for instance to gather information on perspectives of teachers on interdisciplinarity, within a framework where the implementation of well-defined interdisciplinary instruction was the underlying background (McBee, 1996). In our study, we took the perspective of studying interdisciplinarities as diverse and rich situated practices arising in schools, with the goal of achieving a case-based rich description of these educational practices.

An ethnographic approach had been previously taken for the study of educational practices with a specific focus on the materiality of education (Roehl, 2012), highlighting the contribution of things to classroom practices seen as complex, interwoven assemblages.

In a Flemish research project we selected cases recently arose in the context of the educational reform, being referred to as ‘interdisciplinary’ by local school actors (teachers, coordinators, school management). We dove in these practices as educational ethnographers with the purpose of achieving a rich, complex description of interdisciplinarities appearing in Flemish ‘modernized’ secondary education.

We considered the following research questions:

- How can interdisciplinarities in modernized secondary schools be described as practices by an ethnographic study of cases considered to be ‘interdisciplinary’ by local actors?

- What common aspects or elements arise (if present at all) from the analysis of the ethnographic descriptions of the studied practices, that can be associated with their being ‘interdisciplinary’?

While our research has been focusing on interdisciplinarity as stimulated in Flemish secondary schools by a local reform, a similar trend is present in other European countries (see for instance the case of Finland (FNBE, 2016)), and has been driven by European policy (EC - European Political Strategy Centre, 2017). For this reason, our approach and results can be relevant for educational researchers in other European countries.

At least since the 19^th century, schools have linked, in one way or another, history and citizenship education. Chile was not the exception (Serrano, Ponce de León and Rengifo 2012). In the last few decades, history curriculums around the world have experienced important transformations, as new ideas about historical thinking circulate transnationally and are adopted locally. “Concepts of second order” are a key component of this new way of understanding history education (Arteaga and Camargo 2012, Seixas 2015). Since the mid 2010s, the Chilean Ministry of Education has implemented a new history education curriculum, which closely follows these pedagogical ideas. In this context, this paper aims to answer the following question: in which ways this transnational curricular shift has affected the existing links between citizenship history and citizenship education in Chilean schools?

This paper proposes a vertical case study approach (Bartlett 2014, Bartlett and Vavrus 2014) to answer this question. Thus, it analyzes the shifting relations between history and citizenship education at three different, interconnected levels: 1) the curriculum level (how transnational ideas about history education are adopted and/or adapted in the process of crafting the Chilean history education curriculum); 2) the implementation level (how the curriculum directives are adopted and/or adapted by textbook authors and teachers); and 3) the learning-experience level (how students make sense of these ideas, as they experience them at school). Connecting curricular analysis with ethnographical fieldwork at one Chilean high school, I expect to illuminate the complex ways in which transnational ideas about history and citizenship education are adopted, resisted, and appropriated in local contexts and through interconnected social practices.

Achieving the aforementioned objective requires to understand citizenship as a relational practice (Lawy and Biesta 2006). By engaging in citizenship practices, individuals are constantly establishing relationships and positioning themselves with respect to others. Numerous anthropological studies have focused on how individuals and groups challenge the limits established by traditional understandings of citizenship and, in the process, affect their relationships with other members of their society (Lazar 2008, Paz 2018). Understanding citizenship as a relational practice implies also to recognize that the school is not a place where a set of citizenship knowledge and skills are unidirectionally transmitted. The anthropology of citizenship education has questioned this view, as well as other dominant theories that claimed that schools were ideological apparatuses of the state (Althusser 2006 [1971]), institutions for the reproduction of classes (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990), and sites of dissemination and induction in models of patriotic citizenship (Anderson 1991). Rather, these studies understand schools as spaces of contestation, negotiation and cultural production (Sobe 2014), in which students, teachers and other actors are affected by their context as they appropriate and/or resist the ideas made available for them (Benei 2008, Luykx 1999).

Further, citizenship as a relational practice has a relevant temporal dimension. As Lawy and Biesta (2006) rightly point out, understanding citizenship as a practice means abandoning the notion that it is the end result of an educational process, recognizing that "young people learn to be citizens as a consequence of their participation in the actual practices that make up their lives” (45). More importantly, the way how school actors approach this temporal dimension of citizenship, can have important consequences for the teaching-learning processes that take place in the school (Gordon and Taft 2011). This is way, examining the changing social practices that link history and citizenship education at different levels, can help us comprehend how young people are learning to be citizens and historical actors in the present.

This presentation is based on multispecies ethnographic research conducted in a Finnish zoo with the aim of looking at education as more-than-human practice (Kirksey & Helmreich 2010; Ogden et al. 2013; Rautio et al. 2021). The overall educational aim in the research is to cultivate “arts of attentiveness” (van Dooren et al., 2016) towards multispecies co-existence in all its complexity. We ask and experiment with the question: how to take other than human species as protagonists of the stories in their own right? Focusing especially on encounters and assemblages involving human children and barnacle geese, we ask: how does a multispecies approach based on open-ended assemblages work as a critical educational approach, and what could multispecies stories teach us about educational practices?

Our approach is prompted by discussions around the so-called Anthropocene (e.g. Latour 2017) that have stressed the interdependencies of humans, other species, and materialities (Godfray et al., 2018). This discussion insists on reconsideration of anthropocentric epistemologies in current educational practices and research methodologies (Common Worlds Research Collective, 2020).

For this study, of specific interest is a policy adopted by the zoo which aims to further co-living of humans and barnacle geese in the zoo area. During spring time and early summer the zoo is a popular place for groups of school kids to visit. Simultaneously it is home to the population of wild barnacle geese, which nest there every year. The shared history of human and barnacle geese in Finland is a relatively short one, and not without conflicts. Barnacle geese are “newcomers” as nesting birds in Finland, and the population has increased rapidly during the last decades (Yrjölä et al., 2017). The fast growing presence of these birds have brought out irritation, economical concerns, political dispute, fear of bacteria and viruses and even hatred.

The short and problematic history of the cohabitation of humans and barnacle geese in Finland calls for attentiveness towards complexities and imagination to find new ways of co-living and becoming-with in consequential relationships with others (Van Dooren et al. 2016).

Within ethnography and several other methods, questions often arise regarding observation. In this paper, I will discuss the research question What happens when a phenomenon is observed? and highlight two concepts in quantum physics (Zellinger 2010, Nørretranders 2022).

Superposition means that a particle is in many places at the same time. The particle can move by choosing all paths between two points simultaneously and information can travel over great distances without taking any time at all. Entanglement means that two particles have properties that they get from being connected by being either opposite or equal. When the particles are separated, they will still be entangled and have superposition (Zellinger 2010, Nørretranders 2022).

Superposition and entanglement mean that it is not possible to describe a particle without simultaneously describing that it is part of a context with the other. They form a whole and cannot of course be in and of themselves, if the state of one changes, the other does the same (Bohr 2013, Nørretranders 2022). This is something that goes on until the particles are measured or observed. Then the particle must profess existence by choosing a state and becoming a position of either 0 or 1. This contributes to going from superposition to position and creating a duality between subject and object. But in the meantime, and before they are observed, the particles are in many states at the same time, a superposition (Nørretranders 2022).

What does this mean for a research process, is it possible to do research without turning phenomena into objects? One possibility is to use the body as a research instrument. The body has superposition and comes into being through entanglement as long as it does not make other phenomena into objects. Researching with the senses of the body makes it possible to be touched by the affects (Massumi 2002) of what is created when phenomena are in superposition and entanglement, which in turn can lead to descriptions that strive to convey the genesis of the phenomena without turning them into objects. Using examples from educational research, this paper describes how this can be used as multisensory methods with a perspective that we call haptic sensorium (Bergstedt 2021a, 2021b) which will assist in creating our understanding of the relationship between body and matter and how our bodies are transcorporeal and always more than just human (Alaimo 2012, William 2021).

Theoretically, the paper is in close connection with research in posthumanism and new materialism, and our ambitions have been to create new knowledge in the fields of ethnology and post-qualitative methods (Barad 2007, S:t Pierre 2013, Juleskjær 2020, Bergstedt 2021b). Research that can give us new knowledge of how bodies and matter connect and have an ethical implication for awareness of the responsibility and care in human-nature relations.

Increasingly in education we require our teachers and educators to implement culturally responsive learning experiences for a range of culturally and ethnically diverse students. For many this involves engaging with “difficult knowledge”. This paper argues that for educators to engage productively in culturally responsive pedagogies an engagement with difficult knowledge, through acknowledgement of the history and contemporary racial and ethnic practices, both implicit and explicit, needs to be addressed. Britzman (2013) talks about “difficult knowledge” in relation to disrupting ignorance of racial and ethnic stereotyping and bias. The concept of being “privileged” is difficult for many whites to comprehend, claiming ignorance and resistance. Garrett and Segall (2013) critique the belief that ignorance is simply a “lack of knowledge” (p. 295) and resistance an active not doing what is asked of (297). They redefine ignorance as a strategy of avoidance, which they link to psychoanalytic theories of “unconscious knowing” and “difficult knowledge” (Britzman 2013). Garrett and Segall argue that whites have raced ways of knowing through living in a raced society and further, this knowledge is uninterrogated white racial knowledge. Ignorance, redefined as a dynamic of knowledge, is a matter of choice, it is an active ‘forgetting’, a refusal of information and a desire not to know (Fitzpatrick 2018; Bell & Ream, 2021). For culturally responsive pedagogies to engage with an aim for social justice through decoloniality, strategies of ignorance employed to avoid acknowledging the privileges inherited through colonial histories need to be disrupted. Although difficult, these fraught colonial histories and positionalities of privilege need to be remembered and critically interrogated, and ways for educators and students to engage productively in difficult conversations need to be explored and realised.

To articulate the phenomenon of white educator paralysis (Leonardo, 2015) this paper draws on the complexity of difficult knowledge (Pitt & Britzman, 2015). Critically engaging with and interrogating theories and pedagogies of positionality, Postcoloniality, ‘working-the-hypen’ and decoloniality, it reimagines the place of critical reflexivity in teacher training and educators practice. Critical reflexivity requires a move to contextualise positionality in an experience, and recognise the interplay between power, privilege and bias within our own lives and practices (Fitzpatrick 2018). Decolonisation work is both difficult and contested (Fūnez-Flores, Beltrán and Jupp 2022). Significant to the role of an educator is recognition that white racial groups often have difficult histories and critically interrogating these histories works as a form of decolonisation through making colonial structures visible, in being truthful, in unsettling the dominant narratives, resisting hegemonic discourses, and providing context to difficult conversations to address material change (Fitzpatrick, 2018). Coming to know the past, the telling of alternative histories and alternative knowledges are all part of the critical pedagogy of decolonisation (Smith 1999). The possibility also of indigenising education, where Hoskins and Jones (2022) argue, indigenous ways of being and knowing are normalised, “offer[ing] a better, more just, society” (3). This paper argues practices such as culturally responsive pedagogy require a critically reflexive approach to ensure a perpetuation of binary categories don’t persist, and instead the possibility of new and emerging identities are able to flourish. Critically reflexive practices drawn on, to imagine differently and further the work of culturally responsive pedagogies are the methodologies of Critical Autoethnography and Critical Family History.

The pandemic disrupted my life-history practices. I developed a quirkier way of working that blurred the distinctions between living and researching, my way of exploring my ‘own street corner’ (Deegan, 2007). This took neither an emic (native) or etic (theoretical) perspective (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007) but rather an observational one, capturing contemporary moments of everyday life. These moments – alone or in combination – I, then, present as short vignettes or stories. Interpretation is present in the seeing and the storying (I am part of the processes) but made more explicit later when, working reflectively, I consider what triggered those impressions that came unbidden in a nod towards analysis.

I present this work as educational, as it represents a form of learning – mine. My methods were emergent, responsive to circumstances rather than found and applied, subject to change and adaptation, and only later embedded within a number of theoretical frameworks as I began to see where I might fit. At the conference, I will recount how walking on overly crowded footpaths during lockdown I managed to contain my irritation by turning the actions observed and conversations overheard into data; material that I could twine together into composite stories of everyday life to capture a historic moment of global crisis at the local level. I examine how I came to see myself not merely as a geographer who noted the landscape around me but a flâneur, one who walks unseen within the crowd seeing what there is to be seen; a living, acting, writing version of the archetypal figure favoured by many European authors. Balzac (1826), Baudelaire (1863/2010) and Walter Benjamin, in his unfinished work on The Arcades of Paris (1999, but compiled 1927-1940), notably used this literary device to comment, as if impersonally, on the developing urban scene as it unfolded.

In contrast, my aimless wandering was constrained to an East Anglian village but possibly this made the process of what I have termed “Skulking and Spying” along with eavesdropping, easier (Wright 2023). Wide grassy verges and largely traffic-free lanes enabled people to loiter to chat (or shout across a two-metre gap) in a way that narrow streets would not have done. Early stories focused on life as a senior citizen accompanying an elderly relative whose normal activities were curtailed on a daily walk, I began to see the world through her eyes, as I checked perilous uneven kerbs, thoughtless cyclists and runners, dogs and children who rushed ahead heedless of the consequences of collision. Later I found stories from across the social spectrum and began, too, to ‘listen in’ in more sedentary locations – on buses and trains, in cafes and shops, as the world began to re-awaken.

In addition to presenting my emergent methodology and showing how this was a learning process, I will examine how my approach sits alongside other qualitative traditions, and particularly its alignment with forms of ethnography. I will set out my claim to flâneurie and offer two new stories as examples of the process in action, both of which relate to the broader topic of difference and diversity. The first, “Kids are free” arose when breakfasting in an ‘eatery’ in an English outer city neighbourhood that served both customers of the next-door motel chain and the local community. The second, “A bag with baggage” stems from a verbal exchange witnessed as I queued at a local supermarket checkout, in a semi-rural village and, at the very least, captures cultural misunderstanding.

The Spanish Civil War bursts into Electra's life at the age of four, filling her life with pain and fear along with her family and so many other families who experienced abandonment and the flight from their homes and their land towards an uncertain future. We are situated in Alameda, a town in Malaga, Spain. Alameda is a land of peasants, olive trees and esparto grass, which provide a livelihood for its inhabitants. Electra is forced to be called by a safer name when a new government regime comes to power. Her name is struck off a civil register in an attempt to erase her republican history. This event is the trigger for Electra's desire to tell her autobiography. From this moment on, Electra's daughter begins an investigation as a researcher into the formation of her mother's identity through the events she recalls and narrates. How do her circumstances influence the construction of her basic identity? What can we learn about her from her own account? Is the review and reflection of her life relevant to herself? How does the investigation transform the researcher's life? But we are not only talking about the spoken or written account. The reflection that appears in the photographs found on the events experienced provides us with a social, political, demographic, geographical, historical, ethnographic... context, which at the same time completes a story, a narrative in which we can immerse ourselves in a time and events. A photograph found, when Electra is now ninety-two years old, fills her world with memories that uncover a silenced epiphany, the death of her younger sister as a result of famine and disease in wartime.

Perhaps we cannot change our past, but we can reinterpret it. The truth is rarely visible in a war, we only know the versions of some parts of it; but the polyphony of voices that images can provide is invaluable. They are not dynamic, linear stories in time; they are static stories of moments suspended in events that are recorded. These images are guarded, passed on, inherited, contrasted, recovered... they have their own history in themselves. The images that fill Electra's childhood life are very few, but relevant. One of them, raising her fist to the voice of "Cheers comrades", indicated to her by the photographer, tells the key moment for which many other people died. Studying the characters and their relationships gives us an insight into their own history.

The photograph is responsible for reminding us of the exact size of the body he had, of that look that without the image one would end up forgetting. That is why families choose photographs, when they exist, as a place to continue talking to the dead, because the sharpness of the portrait is perceived as the place where conversations with the absent are precisely sharper, more transparent, a direct path towards what is no longer there (Moreno, 2018, in Moreno, 2021: 3).

Through Electra's accounts of her entire history during the war and post-war periods, the readers "see" these narratives through images that are generated in their minds. These images are formed as a result of events experienced by themselves or others, but which have left their mark, resonate and create the imprint of an image that is stored in our archive.

Recent methodological moves toward post-qualitative forms of research have “shaken the tree” regarding formulaic approaches to qualitative inquiry (e.g., see St. Pierre, 2018, 2021; Tesar, 2021). Coupled with the increasing theoretical salience of posthumanism and new materialisms, and the urgency of work on de-colonising, these challenges are (arguably) requiring all qualitative researchers in education to re-examine the ontological bases of their projects. While critical ethnography is not a post-qualitative approach to research, we are inspired by the arguments of post-qualitative researchers to think critical ethnography differently. At the same time, we are cognizant of the important history of ethnographic approaches to research, and commitments in the field to balancing theory with context, deep relationalities, and empirical reflexivities. Rethinking critical ethnography - as some researchers are already doing (e.g Patti Lather, Helena Pedersen, Justin Coles, Nik Taylor, Anna Hickey-Moody, ) might require education ethnographers to embrace lost practices and practices of getting lost. All ethnographers are lost. We lose our way in the very beginning: in the entangled forest of questions and concerns, at the intersection of emotions, in the demands of fieldwork, in searching for ‘proper’ academic questions. We are lost in the deep mud of the field, and then, in the writing and rewriting, in the maze of analysis, in ontological uncertainty. Patti Lather (2007) argues that doing (critical) ethnography might be about getting lost. She challenges researchers to move beyond a position of ‘knowing’ toward one of greater uncertainty and questioning, while not losing completely a hold on issues of equity and politics. Getting lost then might also require inquiry into the political-historical bases of questions, contexts and ethnography’s problematic anthropological and colonising roots.

Relying on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper discusses how standard educational distinctions between theoretical and practical knowledge, manual and intellectual work, and technology and people, reinforces the current challenges by those training apprentices in the machine, electrical engineering, and metal industry (MEM) in Switzerland.

Since the 1980s many advanced economies have witnessed a major reorientation in the pattern, form and sources of capitalist economic growth, involving, on the hand a decline in contribution of industrial manufacturing to their gross domestic product (GDP), employment, and trade, and rapid growth of employment, and economic output in the service sector, on the other. These fundamental transformations in the economic structure have been described in terms such as post-Fordism, knowledge economy or information society. The assumption that knowledge work will take the place of traditional industry labor, was finally the key to the sociotechnical imaginary of a de-industrialized society (Haskel & Westlake 2018; Jasanoff & Kim 2015; Moldaschl & Stehr 2010).

A major focus of sociological and anthropological work and education studies was the declining employment opportunities for young working class men in the «new» «knowledge economy» labor markets, where manufacturing declined rapidly over the last four decades and was offshored to lower cost locations (Bourgois 2002; McDowell 2020). Young people with low levels of education and social and cultural capital no longer experience, in many post-industrial countries, a linear transition from school to employment and face increasingly precarious forms of work and self-employment (Sinnons & Smyth 2018). We know, however, little about the relationship of youth, education and industry work in advanced economies, where production remained «at home» (Streckeisen 2008).

This paper presents an ethnographic case study from Switzerland, whose MEM industry sector has also undergone major restructuring since the 1990s (e.g offshoring, automatization, tertiarization), but many internationalized firms still run production facilities in the country and the need for manual labor has not disappeared. It is in labor intensive professions that firms increasingly struggle to recruit apprentices. They least fit, as we argue, with a sociotechnical imaginary of an information society in which labor becomes immaterial and is freed from all forms of material constraints, whether they are technical, economic or societal. This paper explores the attempts of industry actors to make their vocational education more attractive to young people and contrasts these strategies with the lived working experiences of apprentices in the sector.

The university has long desired to be a location for innovation and interdisciplinary scholarship. This desire is especially prominent as entrepreneurship is now part of the mandate for many institutions of higher education (Boldureanu et al., 2020). Yet much of the work being done at the university is hindered by a “silo” mentality of disciplinary isolation and a 19th century model of instruction.

In this paper, we present an anthropological approach to the studio and our ethnographic research on design studios as a radical space for addressing "wicked problems" (Matthews et al., 2022). Wicked problems are vexing because they cannot easily be answered using only one disciplinary perspective. Examples of wicked problems include seaside house designs that can withstand climate change or designs for effective community health systems in an urban pandemic. This paper focuses on the studio as both a place but also a set of tools and teaching strategies for constructing relationships across the disciplinary fields of architecture, art, science, and humanities. We also argue that the studio can potentially be a space where students and faculty can develop epistemic models that often challenge disciplinary knowledge.

The use of the design studio has grown in prominence since Schön (1985, 1987) suggested that studio-based design instruction could be expanded beyond architecture courses to the benefit of students in all fields of study. Design studios tend to be focused around some kind of project, representation, or design (broadly conceived) in which students tackle an ill-defined, open-ended problem through scientific and creative activity (Hoadley & Cox, 2009; Shaffer, 2007). Critique (also called the “crit”) is essential to studio-based learning, as a means to invite students to see their work as iterative, and open to revision. In addition, the crit offers a space for self-reflection and inspiration for continued improvement (Dannels, 2005). Finally, relationship building is particularly important to an interdisciplinary studio; students and faculty with different training and backgrounds work together to develop a common vocabulary and repertoire of resources for addressing their chosen problem. Faculty in the design studio become facilitators of student work, while the students themselves choose the direction of their research and designs.

In order to understand the shared culture and community of practice within the design studio, we use ethnographic methods to examine the relationships among participants. We also interrogate how various elements of the studio's physical features and discursive spaces are leveraged by students and the instructors. We also employ autoethnography to examine our own role as insider/outsider in the cultural processes within the design studio - one author is a design studio instructor and the other is an educational researcher who developed the studio course.

Games today make up a large part of children's and young people's lives. The Domestic Players Barometer (Kinnunen et al, 2022) shows that 80,3% of Finns play digital games and the youngest participants are the group that plays the most. Both pedagogically and commercially developed games can offer the player the opportunity for learning and development (Barr, 2019). Competitive gaming presupposes, among other things, functioning cooperation and good communication skills (Rusk, Ståhl, Silseth, 2020; 2021; Rusk & Ståhl, 2020). However, there is a need to better understand commercial games from a pedagogical perspective (Barr, 2019; Gee, 2007). We suggest ethnographic research as one approach to gain such understanding from a participant’s perspective. Echoing contemporary ethnographic research, we see “a shift from away from ‘traditional’ single-sited anthropological ethnography of education, towards blended ethnography that encompasses research sites that are both physically and digitally constituted” (Tummons, 2022, p. 153). However, such a shift has methodological as well research ethical implications, which is the focus of this abstract with online gaming as the context.
Digital games, which enable new arenas for learning and identity practice, have often been studied through a normative or predominantly technical interest (Bennerstedt, 2013). This tendency comes in part from the lack of analytical approaches to understanding the direct and synchronous digital interaction, not to mention the methods for collecting data (Ståhl, 2021). Therefore, such research cannot describe how children and young people, situationally, interact through digital games, both inside and outside school. There is a need for an empirical scientific basis describing how the interaction actually is done, instead of relying on self-reported results, questionnaires or data on the interaction a posteriori (Meredith & Potter, 2014; Rusk & Ståhl, 2020). Consequently, for video ethnographic research and research on digital social interaction, the next step is to embrace the potential of data collected from the participants' point of view at the very moment of the event.

The video game play data in the project comes from diverse multiplayer games from various offline and online spaces that are part of Finnish social and educational organizations, as well as players’ own gaming outside the activities of said organizations. The data includes screen recordings and other ethnographic data of both more and less competitive gaming from a player perspective. The aim of the current research project “EduGaming - playing together in- and outside of school” (2022-2025) to understand gaming in- and outside of school from a player perspective. The aim of this presentation is twofold: a) to present previous research endeavors on competitive gaming and educationfrom a player perspective as well as b) to discuss possible future directions for participant focused research on co-play in competitive gaming.

In recent decades, Sweden has experienced a large increase in the number of migrant adolescents, many of whom arrive with little prior experience of school-based learning (Skolverket, 2016, p. 189). Learning to read and write for the first time, and in an additional language, represents a great challenge to recent migrant adolescents who have little previous experiences of formal schooling. While engaged in the process of developing literacy in a second language, migrant students must also navigate their ways into, or learn to read, a new society (Franker, 2017). Therefore, learning a new language and developing literacy in a new sociocultural environment not only involves learning the grammar, principles of decoding scripts and new vocabulary, but also the ability to engage in new discourses. For example, teenage students may have to learn to talk about the body’s anatomy and functions, as well as subjects related to relationships or sexuality, which might represent taboos to some students. As Alexander (2008) put it: “Learning how to talk fluently and critically about sex and sexuality composes a significant part of becoming literate in our society” (p. 2).

In this investigation, the analyzed interactions concern topics of sexuality and the constitution of families. Such topics might raise questions about heteronormativity, which, according to Cameron and Kulick (2003), can be defined as “those structures, institutions, relations and actions that promote and produce heterosexuality as natural, self-evident, desirable, privileged and necessary” (p. 55). Thus, this ethnographic study combines two fields of research that rarely meet, at least in a Nordic context (Milani et al., 2021); namely, the education of basic literacy in Swedish as a second language and discourses about sexuality.

The aim of this study is to investigate how learning about sexual and gender diversity may enhance recently arrived migrant students’ understanding of different cultural norms, including some that may be considered taboos, in the context of an introductory language course in Sweden. I will argue that this understanding can be enhanced not only through the teaching of tolerance towards others but also through examinations of different practices related to sexuality. Concurrently, this cross-cultural educational context presents challenges and pitfalls that places high demands on teachers when choosing their subject content and their ways to teach it. For instance, teachers need to navigate among discourses related to sexual identity, which are not evident within queer theory: “Rather than affirming sexual identity categories, queer theory questions the need for them. Rather than legitimizing minority sexual identities, queer theory problematizes all sexual identities” (Nelson, 2002, p. 48). Using the concept of sexual identity might actually contribute to the binary opposition that was to be avoided (Nelson, 2002, p. 47). Therefore, teachers’ eagerness to use a pedagogy of inclusion (Nelson, 1999, p. 376) to enhance tolerance towards others might contribute to the dichotomy between heterosexual or gay students. Instead, Nelson advocates a pedagogy of inquiry, which is not aiming to enhance tolerance towards the other, but about analyzing how discursive and cultural practices create heteronormativity: “Whether the intention is to critique these practices or to learn them (or a combination of the two), the task is to investigate the workings of language and culture in order to make them explicit” (Nelson, 1999, p. 389). Thereby, Nelson means that the admittance of differences, and the possibility to investigate them, are crucial for intercultural comprehension (2002, p. 48) and therefore for the possibilities to communicate in a certain society. This claim supports the use of this framework to analyze the education of this cross-cultural context.

This contribution builds on a year-long ethnographic fieldwork in a 6^th turned 7^th grade class in inland Norway between January and December of 2020. The study was conducted for my PhD-project about Boys’ identity formation in at school and in the classroom which has a focus on gender, social class, and identity. The main research question for the project is “How does gender and class play a part in identity formation in the social life of boys between 11 and 13 in school, and how does it form their understanding of the world and the future?”. An inspiration for the project is the ongoing discussion regarding boys in school getting lower grades than the girls and dropping out of upper secondary and tertiary education more frequently (Eurostat, 2021), which makes it important to understand how ideas and practices of gender and masculinities are formed and take place among pupils at school. Furthermore, it is of importance to understand the interplay between the school and its pupils, and how they mutually influence each other, and produce more and less acceptable ways of being and behaving.

In this contribution I discuss how certain behaviors and ways of being are associated with perceptions of risk, and how they are manifested and communicated in the classroom. In school pupils are aware that bad behavior leads to bad results, which then can turn into bad grades in secondary school, and later to dropping out of school and/or not getting a good job/future. As a consequence, a failure to follow expectations set by the school is perceived with an inherent risk. In this contribution I will discuss this perception of risk (regardless of whether the risk is “real” or not) through the use of relevant ethnographic examples from my fieldwork. I will especially look at how ideas of the future and what it holds are used on one hand to keep pupils in line by the teachers, and on the other hand as a part of oppositional practices by some of the pupils.

The ethnographic context will be linked to the more general discussion regarding how boys are doing at school to highlight how risk perceptions in the classroom are affected by the discourse surrounding boys at school and vice versa. To explore these issues, I will make use of the concept of learner identities, which Kristinn Hegna describes as the way a learner see themselves in the world and how it makes them relate to their participation in learning (Hegna, 2019, p. 53). These learner identities, in turn, can be related to subject positions and pupil roles, and the expectations related to them in the classroom and at school (Lyng, 2004). To connect these oppositional and problematic pupil roles with the already existing societal worry about boys’ school performances I will use Ian Hacking’s concept of looping effect where categories and category mutually affect and constitute each other (1992). Furthermore, Anthony Giddens’ perspectives regarding self-identity on how modernity have made the self into a reflexive project where the future is always making itself known in the present (1991, p.3) is highly relevant. This ever-looming future in the present coupled with the reflexive project of the self has given the individual responsibility of a successful life, thus creating a possibility of leading a failed life. This makes inhabiting divergent learner identities and pupil roles deemed problematic a risky endeavor. The aim of this contribution is to show how these discourses and ideas makes themselves known and felt in everyday life at a school in Inland Norway.

Pedagogical activities in schools are necessarily always directed at the individual pupil on the one hand and the school class as a group on the other. This creates a tension that teachers need to manage. The growing diversity of the pupils exacerbates this tension, as diversity increases, but the demand for community and shared commitment cannot be completely suspended. For all the tendencies towards individualisation as the preferred response to growing diversity, schools cannot avoid creating community. This is not only the task of the school, but also necessary if the activities of the pupils as a group are not to be in permanent conflict with each other.

Diversity, individuality and community are thus in conflict with each other in the classroom. In recent years, with the 'opening up of teaching' for a different way of dealing with diversity, practices have increasingly been implemented which can be described as contratualism (Brown et al., 1996). This refers to the tendency for pupils and teachers to enter into contracts.

Contracts have many functions. Contracts can be used to coordinate the actions of the signatories They can create a binding obligation to perform expected behaviours. They establish and secure a ‘norm-oriented’ basic order of the social. Finally, contracts legitimise the actions of their signatories by providing a reliable basis for actions (Nagel 1991).

In school classrooms, learning contracts with pupils are on the one hand orientated towards measuring pupils performance in specific fields (Greenwood & McCabe, 2008; Coy, 2014). On the other hand, regulatory approaches to behaviour, such as the ‘time-out room’ – where pupils are sent when they ‘disturb the class’, and where they must complete a contract to return to class participation – are based on contractual assumptions (Adamson et al., 2019). Such pedagogical practices follow the principle of negotiating rather than commanding. Contracts should govern social interaction, create community and respect the individuality of the pupils. But they also provide an opportunity to address these rules, norms and values pedagogically. A common basis for behaviour is to be practised and established through contracts (Budde et al. 2021).

On the one hand, contractual pedagogy is welcomed in the context of democratising reforms that seek to consider the agency and self-control of individual children (Sant 2019). It is also seen as contributing to an inclusive approach to diversity. On the other hand, the power effects inherent in this instrument need to be questioned. It is assumed that contractualism is intertwined with power effects that can be understood as both self-governmental and external regulation (Apple 2011). Contractualism is criticised for establishing a pedagogical order based on homogenising notions of the school as an institution. Against this background, the article asks what power effects are produced by contractualism as a strategy for dealing with diversity in school character education?

To this end, a practice-theoretical perspective is used, which essentially focuses on the activities of the actors involved. The practice-theoretical based approach assumes that human activities are based on practices which are expressions of social orders. Practices are closely linked to material arrangements such as humans, artifacts, organisms and things (Schatzki, 2005, 476 f.). The paper follows the idea of a "flat ontology", as proposed by Schatzki (2016), for example, which locates social phenomena on a single level of reality. With regard to practice theory, the focus of analysis is on practice-arrangement-bundles. These practice-arrangement-bundles – based on an interweaving of practices, discourses, artefacts and subjectivation- form larger constellations (Schatzki 2002).

All networks hold a meeting during ECER. All interested are welcome.

Global education policies emphasising individualism and freedom of choice are seen to dominate education policies everywhere (Forsey et al., 2008), including in the Nordic countries. The Nordic countries share remarkable commonalities as being archetypal representatives of the social democratic welfare state (Arnesen et al., 2014; Blossing et al., Telhaug et al., 2006), and even so they have experienced radical versions of the liberal market economic models of education policy. Despite their common anchoring in a universal type of welfare state or maybe even due to this, we find that this could premise more radical approaches to neoliberal reforms and could cause new amalgams between welfare and competition state policies.

Thus, there are also important differences between the policies of the Nordic countries – degrees of privatisation, comprehensiveness (Dovemark et al., 2018), and/or distinctions between systems of general and vocational education (Nylund et al., 2018) – emanating from the local social, political, economic, and historical contexts. These differences are particularly pronounced in the way the systems of upper secondary education are structured and governed and therefore provide an argument for comparison. The differences add to the uneven consequences that apparently similar reforms have when enacted in different contexts (Ball, Maguire, & Braun, 2012; Rizvi & Lingard, 2010).

Especially since the 1990s, the societal and political preoccupation with freedom of choice has evolved immensely, with an increasing demand for knowledge about the ways school choices are made, where and for whom the freedom of choice applies, how students experience choice, and what freedom of school choice does to the structures of education. This has happened parallel to other moves linked with globalization of the economy that have profoundly changed the governance structures of education (Clarke, 2019; Lawn and Grek, 2012; Rizvi, 2022). In a Nordic context, this has involved transnational moves from focusing on values and benefits of the welfare state to market forces and individualism (Beach, 2010, 2018; Dahlstedt & Fejes, 2019; Krejsler, 2021; Rasmussen & Lingard, 2018). Such moves are seen to challenge the Nordic welfare states’ vision of ensuring access to education and provision of free education for all (Rasmussen & Dovemark, 2022).

On this background, we – like many other scholars before – consider the Nordic countries relevant cases for a critical study of market-oriented education political reforms. However, comparing is not a straightforward process but one that necessitates much consideration on parameters and levels to compare.

The paper proposal aims to follow up on existing comparisons on the phenomenon of school choice as understood, practiced, and experienced in the Nordic countries, where the free provision of education for all constitutes a welfare state pillar. It focuses specifically on exploring and comparing freedom of choice as central policy issue in the education systems of the Nordic region and addresses how education policies of freedom of choice appear and can be compared in the Nordic countries, how the policies influence and structure the ways students and parents ‘choose’ schools, and – in the light of freedom of choice policies – what happens to the welfare state visions of providing general and free access to education?

Finland’s PISA standings in the last decade have resulted much interest in its pedagogies and curriculum across the globe – not just amongst the education community, but also among economists, INGO’s, and corporate business. This interest has led to a rise in ‘borrowing’ what Finland does, i.e., ‘Finnish Education’ by other countries, in the hope to replicate their PISA success. Some of the countries importing the Finnish curriculum, are worlds away from day-to-day life in Finland, culturally, societally, and politically. Which leads one to question, what is it exactly that is being imported and expected to produce the same results; how is it being implemented; and to what cost?

For decades, the research community has consistently critiqued the borrowing of international policy as questionable policy tool (Rizvi & Lingard, 2009; Cheng, 1998) particularly in relation to borrowing from Finland (Simola, 2005; Salokangas & Kauko, 2015). The ‘businessification’ of education has been highlighted and critiqued (Viruru; 2005) and it is evident that the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) standardised test (PISA) has created the conditions for what Viruru calls an ‘imperialist project’ which may lend itself to a corporate driven agenda (2009). This critique is even more stark in a post-covid world where discourses of ‘catching up’ and ‘knowledge economies’ are dominating not only the educational policy space but also the political and economic arenas. This leads to the posing of important questions, such as the purpose(s) of education and its ability to (re)produce social inequalities and neoliberal values (Giroux, 1983; 2020). It also poses questions about ‘what works’ in the educational space, and for whom (Biesta, 2010)?

One example of ‘borrowing’ is the growth of Finnish international schools in the Majority world. The schools are privately own businesses who purchase the Finnish curriculum, import and localise it, employ a mix of Finnish and local teachers, and establish a fee-paying school. These schools have been established in various locations across the globe (e.g., Oman, Maldives, Qatar, Morocco, Vietnam, India, and Kazakhstan) and cater for middle class and elite children from early childhood to second level education. The study sets out to explore and compare stakeholder perceptions of how Finnish education travels to different national, cultural, social, and political contexts. The wider research study asks:

1. What is the “Finnish education” that is being exported?
2. How does “Finnish Education” as stakeholders understand it, travel to these varied national and local contexts?
3. How are democracy and participation understood and practiced in these schools and how possible “collisions” of different approaches to the same are handled in the school community?
4. Who is the clientele of these schools what implication their involvement has on the local community?

The wider project employs the use of case study approach, and this paper examines a phenomenon that was observed in a case site between local teachers and Finnish teachers. The study employs a postcolonial framework and draws on a multidisciplinary lens to examine the intended and unintended consequences of exporting a model of education from the Minority World to fee paying, private schools in the Majority World.

Three-quarters of an hour can be one lesson hour. Five days define the week and constitute a weekly lesson schedule. Two semesters in combination with holidays define a school year. Time divisions are commonly known, are obvious, visible, and apparent in schools. They have a linear character with a clear beginning or end point, like a school year or a lesson hour. However, not everything is linear when it comes to school time. Challenges in relation to time arise when it is squeezed into other dimensions when time is hidden and non-apparent, and when we cannot define its beginning or its end. When we talk about a school lacking time for something, it is a self-contradictory expression as time is not a phenomenon that can be saved or multiplied. There is no point in focusing on searching for lost time, but it would be interesting to look closer at where time is hidden within the curriculum, how time affects its educational efficiency, and to determine precisely what the educational functions of time within the curriculum are. Drawing on the theory of school practices of Kemmis et al. (2014) and functionalists’ theories of school (Merton, 1969), the presentation will offer a conceptually rich analysis of the temporal organization of educational practices within the classroom.

In classical physics, there is a notion of time as an arrow of infinitesimal moments which flow in a constant stream. This means that time is conceived of as a uniform and linear series of ‘now-points’, a concept in which the past is ‘no-longer-now’, the future is the ‘not-yet-now’, and the present always flows from the past to the future. In this understanding, anything that happens begins and ends at some point in time. In some sense this corresponds to our understanding of ‘clock time’, which constantly moves in one direction – from the past to the future, always escaping the present. The linear perception of time is understood in the classic Aristotelian-cum-Kantian sense where time is the infinite a-priori ‘ruler’ that solidly grounds everything from physics to metaphysics (progression in education is linear). Rappleye and Komatsu (2016) contend that such an understanding of time posits perpetual progression and forward movement. Such an understanding of time within the school activities assumes the forward-moving concept of time. Under this assumption, progress in education is linear (Rappleye & Komatsu, 2016), and education is about gaining knowledge, skills or competencies that are predefined and fixed in time (i.e. school year) (Biesta, 2013). In this understanding, progress is often assessed through high-stakes tests, which restricts teaching and learning (Holt, 2002). This time regime where schools are “fast” derives from the Holt (2002) appeal of ‘slow schools’ which offer temporal space for discussions, analysis, scrutiny and resolution.

A curriculum in Tyler’s (1957) understanding is all the learning experiences planned and directed by the school to attain its educational goals. In our study, the curriculum as set of courses (subjects) that learning institutions offer in the form of subjects and lessons explicitly taught in the classroom (McLean & Dixit, 2018). The hidden curriculum is considered to be part of an unintended learning process created by a school culture and school environment that influences their growth and development i.e., the acquisition of experiences, knowledge, and skills (Berg et al., 2017; Giroux, Penna, 1979). Unintended learning processes may involve practices that happen in schools for which certain times are dedicated such as notetaking, sitting still or asking a question, which for this study are time-related practices. Bloom (1972), considers activities like school teaching about time, order, neatness, promptness, and docility to be unintentional lessons.

The role of an ethnographer in a school is complex and engaging in ethnography ethically requires reflexivity and positional awareness. The researcher holds power in many ways, but when it comes to access to the field school, it needs to be sensitively negotiated and should not be taken for granted (see e.g. Atkinson, Coffey & Delamont 2003). This presentation explores a methodological challenge of what are the frames given to long-term critical ethnographic fieldwork and knowledge production today and what is the position of a researcher in the changing landscape of research, where most of the research is expected to be fast-paced and controlled projects. Our interest in the methodological challenge discussed in this presentation was sparked by an episode in 2018 when we were negotiating access to one of our field schools. The new European general data protection regulation (GDPR) had just been implemented and due to that the municipal office granting research permissions to educational institutions asked us to fill out a form where we should write down “everything we were possibly planning to observe at the field school”. The official negotiations related to access seem to have become more regulated and restrictive and seem somewhat incompatible with the ethical questions related to ethnographic research and the nature of critical knowledge production.

To analyse the multi-layered dynamics of negotiating access to the everyday life of the ethnographic field schools and producing critical ethnographic research we use Gordon, Holland and Lahelma’s (2000, p. 53) three levels of schooling: the official school, the informal school, and the physical school and consider how access is negotiated on all three intersecting levels. The official school consists, for example, the documented research permissions whereas the informal level of the school captures the everyday negotiations of access when we for example asked if we can attend certain classes. The physical school covers possibilities and limitations offered by the school building considering also limitations set to moving, talking and being at the school.

Ecopedagogy (Gadotti, 2010) is a paradigm that overcomes mentalistic accounts of education by stressing on informal education processes(Misiaszek, 2015). Given ecopedagogy’s declared focus on sustainable growth and supra-individual processes, cultural heritage is regarded as pivotal to both understand how communities interact with the environment and what fosters the growth of resilient communities.
Drawing on the above paradigmatic assumptions, this paper showcases the results of an ethnographic inquiry concerning the Carnival of Terceira Island (Azores, Portugal). The intensity and peculiarity of such heritage phenomenon places it in a special place with regards to other instances of European folklore (Marcelli et al., 2022). In addition to a more ‘classic’ ethnographic survey, however, a question is raised concerning the way this specific Carnival plays a role in producing feedback processes that ensure community bonding, an opportunity to review current communal practice, and in general, as a powerhouse for competence development among all generations of islanders.
By focusing not on individual learning but on supra-individual processes, a new understanding of Lave and Wenger’s (1991) notion of peripheral participation is achieved, which provides a strong explanatory framework for what is going on during Terceira’s Carnival. As of 2020–2022, the island community shows the ability to place itself at its own periphery—not in the geographical sense, but in the developmental one. Thematic analysis of collected ethnographic data show that Terceira achieves a type of intentional ‘ontological displacement’ that creates a fictionalized distance with its current self. This, in turn, triggers shared processes of revision that result in increased resilience and ability to tackle global and local challenges with both humour and a sense of purpose.
As a consequence of the above, we maintain that Terceira’s Carnival constitutes a major example of shared learning that extends its benefits to members of the island community at large. Furthermore, it does also act as a dispositif that enables the self-directed change (hence, education) of the whole community, which, thanks to the pursuit of Carnival’s collective goals, puts itself in a position to negotiate its role in the World.

Ethnography in education is gaining momentum. Over the last 20 years, more and more educational researchers endorse ethnography because of its distinctive qualities and its productivity to comprehend interconnections of educational phenomena, from pedagogical practices to the commodification that takes place through educational policy. Ethnography is commended for its unique approach to educational phenomena through continuous and immediate experience in fieldwork and its unfragmented methodical attention to situations and interactions (Hammersley 2017; Wieser and Pilch Ortega 2020). Even though this understanding of ethnography is agreeable to many, ethnographic research builds on diverse traditions, resulting in a plurality of cultures of doing ethnography (Beach and Larsson 2022). Our panel discussion attends to these cultures of doing ethnography, their histories, similarities, and differences. Consequently, this panel discussion explores the pasts in which local cultures of doing ethnography have emerged, the present contexts in which educational ethnography is developing, and the prospects that ethnography holds for the future. To explore pasts, presents, and futures of educational ethnography, we focus our panel discussion on three sets of questions:

Foundations of educational ethnography

What are the ontological and epistemological assumptions on which we build our educational ethnographies?

What are the implications for core spatial concepts such as “the field” in our contemporary, interconnected and globalized world?

Comprehending educational phenomena through ethnography

How do ethnographic approaches enable us to comprehend the pedagogical character of educational phenomena?

What is the impact of emergent theories such as new materialism, the affective turn, posthumanism, or actor-network theory, on doing ethnographic research in education?

Practices of educational ethnography

What research practices enable us to understand transformations of educational practice?

How do we move forward thinking about ethnography as a collaborative process rather than the work of a sole researcher?

The main goal of this contribution is to present a methodological innovation that expands the analytical potential of ethnographic research. As we know, under certain conditions ethnographic research is able to provide "fuzzy generalizations" (Bassey, 1999; Hammersley, 2001), which lead to the transferability of knowledge from one environment or context to others (Gomm, Hammersley, & Foster, 2000). Nonetheless, it is not easy to bridge the gap between individual characteristics that are made visible by the ethnographic approach and the understanding of a whole situation (i.e. actors and actants interacting in and with the given environment), which is needed in order to provide the research with applicable generalization. That is why we combined ethnographic techniques of gathering data with situational analysis (SA).

SA provides us with cartographic tools (Clarke, 2003; 2005) that allow the viewing of the researched environment together with its actors and actants as a dynamic system (Rockwell, 2005; Thelen & Smith, 1998). This is in accord with situational epistemology set by Dewey and developed by his followers (Dewey, 1992, lw.12; Johnson, 2007). SA thus enables researchers to describe a system in which there are no simple linear causal relationships, and yet it is possible to capture the laws and regularities given by the so-called "pragmatic cause" (Rockwell, 2005). This makes it possible to describe such a system and predict its future development without overly idealizing and reducing the initial analytical units of the entire system (quantitative methodology) or focusing on individual non-generalizable cases (qualitative methodology).

A dynamic system is characterized by: 1) the ongoing interactions of actors and actants with each other and with its environment, 2) the complexity of the interactions, and 3) feedback loops that permanently change the "essence" of relationships, and thus the "essence" of the very system elements (Thompson, 2007). The concurrence of the characteristics gives rise to the emergence of new system properties. However, the two-dimensional nature of the cartographic tools of SA does not allow the visualization and subsequent analysis of these emergent processes.

Relational maps allow researchers to find relationships between the basic units of analysis (the so-called "elements"). These relationships (so-called "mechanisms") explain how individual elements contribute to the character of the central element and how they, in this way, influence the whole situation (Clarke, 2005; 2014; Clarke & Montini, 2014). During the construction of the relational map, researchers are led to identify one element as central and in relation to it determine the mechanisms on the basis of which the researched situation is characterized.

This fact, however, leads to methodologically significant questions: How to properly determine the central element? Why this and not that element should be depicted as the central element? When we started to think about the very methodological principle on the basis of which SA is constructed, we realized that by using SA we cannot display the relationships among mechanisms. These relations are manifestations of emergent processes that play a key role in understanding any dynamic system. Thus, we realized that we are limited by the very two-dimensional principle of representation of SA. Inspired by Bachelard's insight into tool-knowledge continuity (1998), the theory of conceptual metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; 1999), and the texts about other related themes (see below), we proposed an extension of SA with a three-dimensional representation. In our research, this allowed us to detect processes of de/synchronization.

Without this innovation, the process of de/synchronization would not be detected and no usable generalization could be presented. The proposed methodological innovation helps researchers doing ethnographic research to construct fuzzy generalizations that strengthen the credibility and applicability of their theories.

In this paper, I explore the benefits and challenges offered to education research by a short-term ethnographic approach. Short-term ethnography is being increasingly used in the fields of education and medical education, emerging under a variety of labels, such as ‘rapid ethnography’, ‘micro-ethnography’ (Pink and Morgan, 2013) or ‘focused ethnography’ (Andreassen et al, 2020). Drawing on a body of international short-term ethnographic studies, as well as on my own experiences and data from the field, I explore this approach and its value for the researcher of education. I first detail the key epistemological assumptions and ethnographic methods at the core of short-term ethnography, explicating certain differences the approach entails in relation to longer ethnographies, partciularly around the selection of a focus of study and common differences in researcher positionality. After explicating the approach, I consider the benefits and challenges that a short-term ethnographic approach offers to education research. I describe a perspective of education as a conglomerate of practices which are multi-faceted and episodic (Nespor, 1987; Kind, 2016). I draw on this perpscetive to argue the value of studying 'episodes' through short-term rich ethnographic explorations. Finally, I explore issues pertaining to researcher positionality in short-term ethnographic studies. I consider the common consequences of tendencies, in taking a short-term approach, for researchers to be familiar with the field (Andreassen et al, 2020), and the simultaneous drawbacks and benefits this entails. It is hoped that this paper will offer food for thought for researcher of education in the usage of short-term ethnographic methods, raising awareness of the value and challenges offered by this increasingly popular approach.

As we have become more experienced ethnographers, we have come to understand being genuinely curious and interested in how the ‘other’ perceives the world, what we call the ‘ethnographic stance’, has begun to permeate our everyday interactions with people in all areas of our lives. This sensitivity towards other humans has not only made us humbler about their (and our) different perceptions of the world, but it has helped us to understand that the ethnographic stance also provides an opening towards understanding how problems arise, what they involve, and perhaps even how to solve them.

When we started out as HE teachers, we sought to engage our students with what we were passionate about. As we became more experienced, we realized that it is better to engage students with what they are passionate about. When they become aware of their passion, what was important to them and what they would like to change, they engaged with learning as a (transformative) process.

The process of being both researchers and teachers has led to us becoming more experienced learners. As we became more experienced learners, we realized that our ethnographic stance has equipped us to not only be more open to other’s perceptions of the world and of important burning issues, but that this has often led to insights that allow for transformation and changes in authentic practices.

Over a number of years, one of the authors developed an innovative learning design, called the change-maker model (Robinson, 2020) that, rather than beginning with knowledge, begins with the student. A central method in the change-maker model is the ethnographic stance. This involves igniting curiosity about the world, equipping students to critically reflect with others and analyze both the practices they encounter and connect with the practitioners they meet along the way. Through this learning design, students are empowered towards transformative learning and change-making. Students become central to the practices they engage with while at the same time developing sensitivity towards those they interact with.

Like many institutions in contemporary society, higher education has become more focused on instrumental reason (Taylor, 1991). For so many policy makers and higher education administrators in Europe, and other parts of the world, their vision of the university is creating a workforce for the economy and creating new innovative products and services (Wright et al. 2020). But the original Humboldt vision, was a much broader vision of what the university could be, with its emphasis on the relationship between open and free exploration and communication and the processes of creating new knowledge. That original Humboldtian vision was central to many of the advancements in the modern world. Ironically, we now have a much more restricted vision, that the elites of the world hope will usher in a new phase of growth in knowledge and the creation of new and expanding forms of value that are good for people and society. This instrumental market vision is the very thing that will rob universities of their creative potential. Rather we pursue a more literal return to a Humboldtian vision through the change maker model. We argue that the ethnographic stance can help students, and faculty, become change-makers.