It is often claimed that the international academic sojourn has the capacity to bring about personal and cultural change in the sojourner, but such claims are not often supported by empirical evidence. Using an autoethnographic approach, this article offers a first-person account of the changes wrought in an international student by their time…

A glance across ethnographic methods terrain reveals multiple controversies and divisive critiques. When training graduate students, these debates and controversies can be consequential. We offer suggestions for teaching graduate ethnographic methods courses that, first, help students understand some of the common epistemological debates in the…

First year students often experience a culture shock as certain literacy practices at the university level are different from their experiences in high schools. Some major challenges that students encounter include students' ability to maintain academic integrity practices in their studies, to comprehend complex academic texts to outline key…

Teaching has attracted growing research attention in studies of human and animal behavior as a crucial behavior that coevolved with human cultural capacities. However, the synthesis of data on teaching across species and across human populations has proven elusive because researchers use a variety of definitions and methods to approach the topic.…

World language teachers can transform how their students learn culture through the use of mobile devices. When world language students use their mobile devices to access authentic current culture, they go from being passive receivers of culture to active cultural investigators. These students go from learning thin surface culture to exploring…

In our paper, we present the story of emancipation of a Roma woman, who works as a social outreach worker. Our method is based on ethnographic approach and our paper focuses on the study the emic perspective of participants in our research. The aim of the paper is to show the tension arising between the actions and expectations of Alice and the…

This article puts forward an experiential teaching method for becoming aware of, getting access to, and giving meaning to the sensory experiences that constitute and shape learning processes during social anthropological fieldwork. While social anthropologists use all their senses in the field, the preparation and processing of fieldwork are…

This article introduces the methodological approach of conversation analysis (CA) and demonstrates its usefulness in presenting more authentic documentation and analysis of children's voices. Grounded in ethnomethodology, CA has recently gained interest in the area of early childhood studies due to the affordances it holds for gaining access to…

Using an abductive, critical-poststructuralist autoethnographic approach, I consider the ways in which masculine of centre, non-binary/genderqueer trans* identities transverse the poles of socializing binary gender systems, structures, and norms which inform higher education. In this paper, I assert that non-binary genderqueer identities are…

This study investigated the motivational and emotional experience of an experienced outdoor activity participant during a three-day guided adventure trek in Colca Canyon, Peru. The research adopted a qualitative autoethnographic approach which provided unique data in the form of diary entries, experiential diagrams, field notes and email content.…

Drawing on ethnographic research in an urban high school in the USA, this article highlights how schooling structures and practices produce and reinforce an ideology of heteronormative binary gender. The construction of gender and sexuality occurs in systematic ways, shaped through structural forces and mapped onto social spaces and bodies. Yet,…

This study retrospectively examines the emergence and development of a new class of full-time non-tenure track employees in a large land grant research university in the U.S., which created the employment category in 1980. We employ cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) to explore how this class of employees became institutionalized within…

General/professional staff are activists in Australian universities. Their activism has seldom been researched in scholarly approaches in higher education studies nor in activism studies. General/professional staff occupy a unique place in the labour force of higher education, and may work in a wide range of professions and trades. A case study of…

This study explored five adults' experiences of place within their middle childhood literacy life-worlds. Middle childhood, the stage of development in which children often acquire reading independence, is also characterized by significant increases in children's geographic accessibility and independence. The findings propose that in the literacy…

In this dialogic article of interwoven stories, we employ a critical autoethnographic approach to explore moments of our lives as we worked through the official "research plan" at the heart of the supervision timeline. Lucinda's doctoral thesis in education, supervised by Jo, highlights the way curriculum emerges from the struggles of…