Multi-sited global ethnography and travel: gendered journeys in three registers

Abstract

This paper joins a barely begun conversation about multi-sited and global ethnography in educational research; a conversation that is likely to intensify along with growing interest in the links between education, globalisation, internationalisation and transnationalism. Drawing on an ongoing multi-sited global ethnography of elite schools and globalisation, this paper explores the role of travel in multi-sited global ethnography and offers a feminist engagement with it. It considers the idea of fieldwork as a travel practice through three different travel registers; the traveller’s tale, critical travel studies and travel as exile. In so doing, it illustrates the reflexive affordances each register offers with regard to the directions of our feminist inquiries into elite schools and our feminist ethnographic practices.

Keywords:

• multi-sited ethnography
• global ethnography
• feminism
• travel
• elite schools

Notes

1. For instance, Hammersley, arguably a doyen of educational ethnography, does not engage global or multi-sited ethnography in his 2006 article on the ‘problems and prospects’ of educational ethnography.

2. In Kenway, Kraack, and Hickey-Moody (2006), we discuss the particular destabilisations and the reasons for them. We also develop the idea of place-based global ethnography.

3. This paper draws from a broader multi-national, multi-sited global ethnographic study of elite schools and globalisation called Elite independent schools in globalising circumstances: a multi-sited global ethnography (2010–2014). This project is funded by the Australian Research Council (DP1093778), and also by Monash, Melbourne, Cardiff and Illinois Universities and the Hong Kong Institute of Education. The project team consists of Kenway and Fahey (Monash), Fazal Rizvi (Melbourne), Cameron McCarthy (Illinois), Debbie Epstein (Cardiff) and Aaron Koh (HKI) and PhD students: Matthew Shaw, Howard Prosser (Monash) and Mousumi Mukherjee (Melbourne). All schools and people are anonymised.

4. See Marcus and Faubion (2009) for a discussion of this concept, as well its various de and recentreings.

5. Hartman (2007, p. 11) offers a fascinating account of the shifting modalities of the heroic anthropologist which include ‘the anthropologist as a figure beset by doubt, by pessimism, by a constant questioning of his own knowledge and emotions’.

6. Australia is still a Commonwealth realm, a sovereign state within the Commonwealth of Nations that has Queen Elizabeth II as its monarch and head of state.

7. There is not space, in this paper, to explore this insight fully. It is the subject of another paper currently in preparation.

8. These townships were part of the apparatus of apartheid, set up at some distance from towns and cities so that black workers could travel in to service white families and white-owned commercial enterprises, yet remain separate from them. They are still the main places of residence for workers in the cities and towns, and despite the building of public housing are overcrowded and include many ‘shacks’ built of corrugated iron and other ‘found’ materials. They are still better places to live, since they have some infrastructure, than squatter camps, euphemistically called ‘informal settlements’ in South Africa, which have grown up on the edges of townships as people previously confined to rural areas by apartheid legislation migrate to the cities to seek work.