Conference Agenda

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.