Conference Agenda

This paper addresses a central methodological challenge in educational ethnography: How can we reconceptualise "rapport" beyond the dominant, human-centric, and linear models? Specifically, it asks how rapport emerges within the "messy realities" of fieldwork in Global South contexts, specifically Mexico and China, when viewed through a posthumanist lens of material entanglement. In conventional ethnographic research, rapport is frequently idealized as a linear "social contract" or a "bridge" built through verbal negotiation and interpersonal skill. Within this discourse, rapport is framed as a necessary precondition that must be established before data collection can begin. Scholars like Tickle (2017) and O'Reilly (2009) have highlighted rapport-building as a foundational method for narrowing the generational gap, often requiring researchers to adopt a "least adult role" (Mandell, 1988) to soften their authoritative positioning. However, we argue that this understanding rests on problematic assumptions: it assumes researchers and children are autonomous individuals negotiating in a vacuum ; it relies on a linear model that artificially separates relationship-building from data generation (White and Drew, 2011) ; and it reflects an anthropocentric bias that privileges linguistic exchange over material engagement (Spyrou, 2018). This is particularly limiting in Global South contexts, where relationality is often lived not as an individualised transaction but as interdependence.

To challenge these assumptions, this paper employs a posthumanist theoretical framework, drawing specifically on Karen Barad’s (2007) theory of agential realism. We shift the analytical focus from "interaction" between independent subjects to "intra-action," arguing that subjects do not pre-exist their encounters but emerge through relational entanglements. Consequently, we reconceptualise rapport not as a social tool but as material entanglement, where agency is distributed among humans and more-than-human actants. This aligns with new materialist perspectives that view research as a "shared enactment" (Schandler, 2017) between researchers, discourse, and material conditions. Utilizing Barad’s concept of "exteriority within," we position the ethnographer not as a neutral observer but as an inseparable part of the phenomenon, challenging the traditional separation between the observer and the observed. This research provides a vital international dimension by bridging Global South case studies with European posthumanist theory. By analyzing fieldwork from Mexico, rooted in indigenous ontologies (Calderón-Carrillo, 2015), and China, where the self is relational (Yan, 2017), we challenge the Western-centric assumption of the autonomous individual. Ultimately, the paper demonstrates how rapport in these contexts is sensed through embodied co-presence rather than negotiated contractually, offering a new methodological path for international childhood studies.

The last fifty years have seen significant changes in higher education (HE) (Rüegg, 2011). Driven by the increasing market-orientation of universities (Cheek, 2017), there has been a growing need to monitor and metricize outputs – especially in the area of research (Ackers, 2008). In the social sciences, this is reflected in a growing number of scientific journals and a steady increase in journal publications (Kulczycki et al., 2018). Furthermore, internationalization practices have become evident in recent years, shaping the desired output not only as journal articles but specifically as English-language, and thus internationally visible, journal articles (Pajic, 2015). This signifies the English language becoming the lingua franca of research activity (Schluer, 2015).

These shifts have substantially altered how scientific knowledge is governed (Capano & Pritoni, 2020) and how researcher identities are configured (Ylijoki & Ursin, 2013). Studies have shown that implementing new policies in traditionally governed HE spaces leads to ambiguous environments (Elken & Borlaug, 2024). This is reflected in scholars’ identities, as neoliberalized aspects of subjectivity, emphasizing efficiency, productivity, and quality, collide with traditional values such as research for the betterment of society and the importance of knowledge transmission (Fanghanel, 2011). This is especially evident in the social sciences, where knowledge has less market-value than in the natural science or engineering (Benneworth & Jongbloed, 2010; Cheek, 2018). Consequently, hybrid identities (Ylijoki & Ursin, 2013) and academic shape-shifting (Barry et al., 2006) have been observed as a result of changing HE environments.

Given the steadily growing importance of academic publishing in the social sciences and the already observed effects on institutional organization and identity, this study set out to investigate how publishing practices in the social sciences are becoming a fundamental aspect of both knowledge and subject production. To do so, we adopted a new materialist understanding of the research apparatus (Barad, 2007) to describe how scientific knowledge and corresponding researcher subjectivities are produced in such changing HE environments. In Barad’s (2007) philosophy of science, the production of research outcomes is divided into the components of object, subject, and method, which together define the research apparatus. A specific constellation of these three components arrives at specific results in the research processes, while a shift in the apparatus results in a shift in the outcomes. This framework treats scientific knowledge as the outcome of human and nonhuman entanglements, rather than the product of an autonomous subject or a collection of autonomous subjects (Barad, 2007).

We hypothesize that the research apparatus should be extended to include academic publishing as a component – configuring both research outcomes and researcher subjectivities. The findings of this study regarding researchers’ chameleoning practices and a continuous negotiation between science and academia indicate that academic publishing is indeed becoming a component of the research apparatus (playing a role as significant as object, subject, and method), producing specific outcomes and subjectivities.

Conducting classroom-based research involves negotiating a complex context with numerous social actors, unique ways of doing, and various discourses in place. This research context lends itself well to nexus analysis, an ethnographic discourse analytic approach (Scollon & Scollon, 2004) with its examination of ways of being (historical body), ways of doing (interaction order) and ways of thinking (discourses in place) (Dressler et al, 2026). Of interest in this session is the aspect of historical body, which captures teachers’ embodied ways of being that have molded and shaped them and their practice over years in the profession (Dressler & Mueller, 2022). In previous nexus analysis research, examinations of historical body have focused on similarities and differences among individual social actors (see Legutko, 2025; Räsänen, 2024; Vainionpää et al., 2020). Yet, work by teachers is often done as a collective (e.g. planning as a teaching staff) (Mueller et al., 2023). In recent nexus analysis research we have therefore applied the concept of social scales (Blommaert, 2007), which “capture a continua of perspective”, allowing us to “map how discourses flow from one scale to another” (Dressler & Hult, 2025, p. 48). This mapping aligns with the social practice of teachers who tend to work together to make decisions and plans over the course of years of collaboration (Dressler & Mueller, 2022). In doing so, we argue that this prolonged work together becomes a part of their individual historical body but also may be conceptualized on a collective scale as the historical body of the teaching staff.

In this session, we present an ethnographic study for which the concept of historical body was captured at the individual and collective scales. The study was a five-year project in German-English bilingual school in Canada which focused on the implementation of a new teaching approach intended to promote oral language production in German, the second language of most students. While teachers implemented the approach individually or in pairs in their classrooms, they also worked as a team to better understand the approach, modify it for their context, and implement it with some uniformity across the program of Kindergarten to grade six (students approximately 5-11 years old). Historical body was an analytic concept integral to the study.

The research question that guides this presentation is: how does this study illustrate the affordances and challenges of conceptualizing historical body on the collective scale? This investigation is significant for our understanding of teaching practice and teacher decision making in classroom-based research and research with ethnographic methods. The concept of social scales expands our understanding of historical body within nexus analysis to include the collective historical body, thereby articulating how professionals working together can appear to be acting as one historical body as a result of collective decisions and experiences.