19. Ethnography
Research Workshop
Engaging with the Sense of the Moment. Ethnographic Approaches to Emotions and Atmospheres in Education
Nelly Alfandari1, Magnus Frank2, Florian Weitkämper3, Clemens Wieser4
1London South Bank University, United Kingdom; 2Europa-Universität Flensburg, Germany; 3University of Education, Freiburg, Germany; 4Aarhus University, Danemark
Presenting Author: Alfandari, Nelly;
Weitkämper, Florian;
Wieser, Clemens
Our workshop explores how ethnographic research can relate to emotions and atmospheres in education (Zembylas & Schutz 2016; Jeffrey 2018; Schoerer & Schmitt 2018). We engage in emotions and atmospheres grounded in some long-standing debates on cultural politics (Ahmed 2004) and the management of emotions (Hochschild 2012), the situatedness of educational knowledge (Haraway 1988) and a growing interest in the affective constitution of social relations (Reckwitz 2015; Slaby & Scheve 2019). Departing from this grounding, we find that doing ethnographies on emotions and atmospheres is linked to some theoretical and methodological questions on which we want to center our workshop.
Here, one key element is to explore the relationships between the bodies of researchers and participants, their respective social positioning, as well as the audience of ethnographically produced knowledge. Emotions and atmospheres challenge us with the question of how we can document them, and equally, how we can make sense of, as well as articulate, their elusive and overwhelming quality on individuals and groups. While emotions and atmospheres remain widely fluid, diffuse, and ambivalent, they also link to issues of power and vulnerability that can have long-lasting effects on collaborating in classrooms and other, non-formal educational settings (Zembylas 2020). In this respect, our attention to emotions and atmospheres points towards key questions in educational ethnography as a method, discipline, and research attitude in the sense of a historically embedded rethinking. In our workshop, we share and discuss our theoretical and methodological engagement in doing educational ethnography that attends to emotions and atmospheres. After an introduction to the relationship between ethnography and emotions and atmospheres, we present three different materials that reflect emotions and atmospheres in education that we subsequently want to discuss together with you.
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedIn our workshop, we juxtapose three different materials from different school research settings:
· Photo material from an image theatre (Boal, 1995) research intervention in an inner city, English secondary school context, exploring shifts in the change of engagement (Gallagher, 2008) between students, the institution and the researcher, looking at (implicit) patterns of exclusion and the subjectivities they produce (Alfandari, 2022).
· Video material from a classroom ethnography in which a teacher got angry with students in one class. In this video material, we can see a teacher attempting to resolve the continual opposition between the didactical orientation of the teacher and the students’ orientation on negotiating peer culture. Interpreting this video material with an appraisal theory of emotions (Moors et al., 2013), I argue that anger is an emotion that reflects the teacher’s commitment to making his teaching about the topic in which he engages, while students see the lesson to be about their peer relations. These different orientations produce a goal incongruence and impair the care relation between teacher and students (Noddings, 2012) to a degree that the pedagogical contract in class is eroded.
· The third type of material consists of excerpts from field protocols of a multi-year ethnography on the practices and thematization of institutional racism in schools (www.konir.de). The focus here, which is interested in atmospheres, is to be placed in particular on the interdependent relationship between affects, discursive and biographical historicities and normalizations or constructions of normality. How does an elusive (Yon 2000) atmosphere arise, for example, in the interplay of ethnographic descriptions and perceptions, field-specific routines and boundaries as well as institutionally embedded certainties, expectations and unspeakabilities?
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsThe final part of our workshop consists of a plenary discussion on how we can do ethnographic research on emotions and atmospheres and the implications that methodological choices have for articulating their meaning. Fundamentally, we believe that an engagement with emotions in ethnography provides us with insights into implicit patterns of exclusion and power dynamics, (Gallagher 2016), as well as the implications that these power dynamics have on the subjectivity of participants in educational settings (Youdell 2006). Focusing on the atmosphere produced through emotional interactions provides us with a fuller understanding of how subjectivities are produced, and how these subjectivities have an impact on each other. Ultimately, we find it empowering to reflect on our entanglement in ethnographic research by attending to our own emotions, and by giving voice to them as an essential part of our research.
ReferencesAhmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh University Press.
Alfandari, N. (2022). Critical pedagogies in the secondary school classroom: Space, engagement, and emotions(Doctoral dissertation, London South Bank University).
Boal, A. (1995). Rainbow of desire. London: Routledge.
Gallagher, K. (2016). Navigating the Emotional Terrain of Research: Affect and Reason by Way of Imagination. In: Zembylas, M., Schutz, P. (eds) Methodological Advances in Research on Emotion and Education. Springer, Cham.
Gallagher, K. (2008). The art of methodology: A collaborative science. In The methodological dilemma (pp. 83-98). Routledge.
Haraway, D. (1988). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies 14 (3), pp. 575-599.
Hochschild, A. R. (2012). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling (Updated with a new preface). University of California Press.
Jeffrey, B. (2018). Ethnographic writing - Fieldnotes, memos, writing main texts, and whole narratives. In Ethnographic Writing (pp. 109–136). E&E Publishing.
Moors, A., Ellsworth, P. C., Scherer, K. R., & Frijda, N. H. (2013). Appraisal Theories of Emotion: State of the Art and Future Development. Emotion Review, 5(2), 119–124. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073912468165
Noddings, N. (2012). The caring relation in teaching. Oxford Review of Education, 38(6), 771–781. https://doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2012.745047
Reckwitz, A. (2015). Practices and their affects. In Allison Hui & Schatzki, T. (eds.). The Nexus of Practices. Connections, constellations, practitioners (pp. 114- 125). Oxford.
Schroer, S. A. & Schmitt, S. B. (eds.) (2018). Exploring Atmospheres Ethnographically. Routledge.
Slaby, J., Scheve, C. v. (2019). Affective Societies. Key Concepts. Routledge.
Zembylas, M. & Schutz, P. (eds.) (2016). Methodological Advances in Research on Emotion and Education. Springer.
Zembylas, M. (2020). The Ethics and Politics of Traumatic Shame. Pedagogical Insights. In Dernikos, B., Lesko, N., McCall, S. & Niccolini, A. (eds.). Mapping the Affective Turn in Education. Theory, Research, and Pedagogies (pp. 54-68). Routledge.
Yon, D. (2000). Elusive Culture: Schooling, Race, and Identity in Global Times. State University of New York Press.
Youdell, D. (2006). Subjectivation and performative politics—Butler thinking Althusser and Foucault: intelligibility, agency and the raced–nationed–religioned subjects of education. British journal of sociology of education,27(4), pp.511-528.
|
