Like many parents in the US, teen mothers regularly have professional portraits taken of their children. This article, based on an ethnographic study of a diverse group of teen mothers in urban California, analyzes these baby pictures as representations of childhood, motherhood and family, and as material objects used in the construction of kin…

Little information is available about teachers' perceptions of the prereferral intervention team (PIT) process. This ethnographic study examined the perceptions of 12 kindergarten through fourth-grade teachers as they progressed through the PIT process in two western New York suburban elementary schools. Data from interviews and observations…

Ethnography derives from traditional anthropology, where time in the field is needed to discern both the depth and complexity of social structures and relations. Funding bodies, seeking quick completion, might see ethnographies as unlikely to satisfy 'value for money' criteria, in spite of the rewards to be gained from time-consuming 'thick…

In asking the provocative question: "What's wrong with ethnography?" Hammersley draws attention to what he sees as the conceptual and methodological confusion arising from two competing strands of practice: "naive realism" and "relativism". As a solution, he offers "subtle realism" to steer a path through and beyond the confusion. This paper…

Professional development for bilingual teachers has traditionally been viewed as a neutral site for training teachers. In the present study, a professional development for bilingual teachers in the United States is explored through ethnographic methods, specifically focusing on both the content delivery, and the interactions between teacher…

This essay turns to feminist ethnography and postcolonial theory to address how the figure of "the stranger" haunts the project of community service learning. By explicating the immediate and broader relations of power that structure these "strange(r) encounters," we are more likely to produce the kind of agitated pedagogy that creates…

This paper first defines race and related dehumanizing experiences and then explores the history of the study of Blacks in ethnography and in psychoanalysis before addressing the primary focus: psychoanalytical ethnography. Psychoanalytical ethnography is valuable for transforming racially wounded communities into vibrant open communities through…

This article ethnographically examines the relationship between success, racial identity, and racial formation among Korean students in one New Jersey public high school. Using Racial Formation theory (Omi & Winant, [1986. "Racial formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990s." New York: Routledge]; Winant, [1994.…

The study investigates learning as knowledge-creation processes on individual and collective levels. The processes were examined in an ethnographic study, conducted in a metal industry company over a four-year period. The empirical study suggests that conflicts and crises experienced on individual level were some kind of incidental starting…

Cheerleading, an American invention, has 3.8 million participants in the United States, 97% of whom are female. It is an adult-sanctioned and typically school-affiliated activity that remains popular in spite of the increase in sports' opportunities for girls in schools. Drawing from popular culture and a middle school ethnography, the authors…

While research on globalisation can hardly be said to have ignored the phenomenon of the global corporation or the globally distributed supply chain, the focus has overwhelmingly been on "globalization from above"--on corporate structures and on the movement of global capital in global "knowledge economies". My focus in this…

To the contemporary investigator of African centered pedagogies, merely looking within the broad background of educational research would miss a substantial portion of the entire ethnographic range of investigations. An integral body of literature reposes in two other significant areas: first, within the indigenous voices of African American…

One of the most fundamental tasks relating to the undertaking of fieldwork for a qualitative research study lies in "gaining access". This involves both securing entry into a particular organisation and ensuring that individuals associated with it, such as employees or users, will serve as informants. In terms of the first problem, a range of…

The paper analyzes adult mathematics education from a cultural perspective. Specifically, its purpose is to broaden our comprehension about this field of knowledge using as a theoretical tool-box an Ethnomathematics perspective founded on post-modern thought, post-structuralism theorizations and Wittgenstein's work developed in his book…

This paper seeks to engage the cultural interface where Indigenous knowledge meets Western academia, by questioning the validity of traditional research methods. Firstly, it is a response to the challenges facing Indigenous people confronted with the ethical and methodological issues arising from academic research. Secondly, it is a journey "into"…