Schools as Organizations: On the Question of Value Consensus (original) (raw)
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Negotiating Blurred Boundaries: Ethnographic and Methodological Considerations (Draft)
The Insider/Outsider Debate in the Study of Religion, Eds. George Chryssides and Stephen Gregg, 2018
The boundaries between being an insider and an outsider in the study of religion are seldom clear-cut. This is in part because fieldwork or any type of qualitative research involves a process of increased knowledge, familiarity and, one might hope, acceptance by those being studied. This can be the case whether one is studying a group of which one was not initially a member (making the strange familiar) or negotiating new relationships as a researcher rather than just a member of a particular community (making the familiar strange). With any work with human subjects relations are dynamic and fluid, and the communities being studied are not necessarily coherent uniform entities. There will be degrees of membership according to one's positionality, whether one is initially an insider or outsider. This chapter examines some of the ways in which fieldwork relationships are negotiated, and the blurred boundaries between the terms 'insider' and 'outsider'. The author uses examples from her anthropological fieldwork with two communities in a number of settings: the Focolare Movement and the Bangwa people of Cameroon. The first setting is the Cameroonian 'town' of Fontem where the Focolare and Bangwa live as neighbours, and where the author has conducted long-term fieldwork. The other settings are the UK, Europe and the United States, where members of the Focolare and Bangwa also interact with one another, and with the researcher (separately and together). Bowie concludes that methodological approaches to studying religious communities based on dialogue, empathy and respect are similar whatever one's status and relationship to those studied. Description The boundaries between being an insider and an outsider in the study of religion are seldom clear-cut. This is in part because fieldwork or any type of qualitative research involves a process of increased knowledge, familiarity and, one might hope, acceptance by those being studied. This can be the case whether one is studying a group of which one was not initially a member (making the strange familiar) or negotiating new relationships as a researcher rather than just a member of a particular community (making the familiar strange). With any work with human subjects relations are dynamic and fluid, and the communities being studied are not necessarily coherent uniform entities. There will be degrees of membership according to one's positionality, whether one is initially an insider or outsider. This chapter examines some of the ways in which fieldwork relationships are negotiated, and the blurred boundaries between the terms 'insider' and 'outsider'. The author uses examples from her anthropological fieldwork with two communities in a number of settings: the Focolare Movement and the Bangwa people of Cameroon. The first setting is the Cameroonian 'town' of Fontem where the Focolare and Bangwa live as neighbours, and where the author has conducted long-term fieldwork. The other settings are the UK, Europe and the United States, where members of the Focolare and Bangwa also interact with one another, and with the researcher (separately and together).
Ethnography and Education Ethnography and Education Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education
and Keywords As described in Beach and Dovemark's 2007 book, Education and the Commodity Problem, critical researchers have identified two fundamental roles for modern-day schools within capitalist states. These are the ideological and material roles and function, where schools produce ideologically compliant workers and consumers for a corporatist economy on the one hand, this is partly through a teaching and a curriculum, which is often hidden and informal; and, on the other form part of a corporate business plan for the accumulation of private capital in the welfare sector through mass outsourcing of welfare-State education provision and the wholesale commodification of education as a public service. This article presents a research method for investigating education in these circumstances. It is a method with a philosophical foundation not only for understanding contemporary educational empirical reality under neoliberal forms of capitalism, but also for developing critical consciousness for the transcendence and transformation of this condition toward a more just form of political economy and human existence. This research method draws from critical realism and its concept of explanatory critique as a way to forge a scientifically robust Marxist critical ethnography. In relation to this, the description of the method accompanies an overview of some of the basic principles and broadly accepted possibilities of and for ethnography and critical ethnography, followed by a presentation of what Marxist critical ethnography is and how Marxist critical ethnography functions as explanatory critique, respectively. This entails description of what explanatory critique is, and how it can be used to develop a philosophy of social science and an ontological base for ethnography. The aforementioned components together expand on a historical, theoretical, conceptual, and political development of ethnography as part of a Marxist approach to research and practice for social transformation.
Forum Introduction: Anthropological Boundaries at Work
This Forum sets out to contribute to the understanding of anthropolo-gists' identification with their discipline, the homogeneity of anthropologists as an academic group, and how our disciplinary boundaries are constructed and embodied. It provides different angles on the academic demarcations influencing how anthropology is practiced in Europe. Four colleagues explore different ways of questioning the boundaries of our discipline, opening up spaces for remaking anthropology (what can be said and done, and by whom). In relation to practices of authority, authorisation and disciplinary jurisdiction, boundaries are key knowledge-making devices. They have effects in bringing particular relations to the fore (Lamont and Molnár 2002). Moreover, and despite being contingent social constructs , boundaries are real in their consequences and require continuous work of maintenance. They equally require defence and policing, altering along the relationship with other disciplines and methodologies. And yet demarcations are not enough to form a discipline. We thus reflect on how definitions of what counts as anthropological knowledge are embedded in specific frames of value, enacting their own notion of significance, and therefore to be considered as contingent and per-formative (Lury and Wakeford 2012; Strathern 2000, 2006). These discussions come to update, complement and in some cases correct past calls for interdisciplinarity, seen as an institutional solution to all kinds of research problems (Barry et al. 2008; Strathern 2007). As described by Regina Bendix in this Forum section, we are asked to dedicate a lot of time to raising funding for research, to designing interdisciplinary formats, and to disciplinary quality control, often at the expense of being in the field or having a voice beyond academia. Also, the demands of the grant-writing process force anthropologists into a position of 'translating their idiom, distorting their paradigms, and misrepresenting the logic of their procedures' to align with the goals of the funding agencies, affecting along the way how qualitative outputs are measured (Bendix et al. 2017: 7).
In P. Smeyers, K. U. Leuven, D. Bridges, N. Burbules, & M. Griffiths (Ed.), International handbook of interpretation in educational research methods. New York: Springer.