Within British schools over the last few decades, we have witnessed a policy move from multi-culturalism to counter-radicalization. In response, this article examines an ethnographic project that illustrates both the relative autonomy of methodology from broader theoretical and substantive questions, as well as the internal creative logic of methodology grounded in the research process. Importantly, the research participants claimed, in contrast to the securitised regime that circumscribed their lives as a 'suspect community' closing down critical discussion in the public sphere, their (ethnographic) engagement in the field enabled them to inhabit alternative representational spaces to the dominant public framing of young Muslims as dangerous men. Ethnography, with its attendant immersion research methods, created the time and space to open up complex explorations of the research participants' emerging understandings, meanings and performances of school life for their generation.