Network ethnography applied: understanding the evolving health and physical education knowledge landscape

ABSTRACT

The progressively global, neoliberal, privatised, and digital education environment poses new methodological challenges for educational researchers, prompting a need to innovate. It has been suggested, however, that better commentary and reflection on methodological innovation in education is required. This paper considers the benefits and challenges associated with the use of network ethnography, one methodological approach that has emerged to address new social complexities. We explain the rationale for, and process of, this methodology through reference to an illustrative case: a network ethnography of the outsourcing of Health and Physical Education (HPE) curricular work to external providers. In doing this we map and critique three interrelated activities (i.e. Internet searches, interviews, and network diagram construction) that constituted our network ethnography. The discussion turns to how network ethnography allowed us to access new knowledge about the outsourcing of HPE curricular work to external providers by, for example, facilitating us in asking different questions, and foregrounding various stakeholders, networks and relationships that we may not have discovered had we relied on other approaches. This illustrative case demonstrates the capacity of network ethnography to generate rich data and offers a provocation for educational researchers to consider expanding their methodological repertoire.

KEYWORDS:

• Outsourcing
• privatisation
• external providers
• network ethnography
• research methods

ORCID

Leigh Sperka http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9946-7548

Eimear Enright http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7206-4781

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council under [grant number DP140102607]; and the Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.