Researching for justice: using meta-ethnographic synthesis to develop knowledge for research for social transformation

Figures & data

Table 1. Six steps of meta-ethnography.

Step 1:	Assigning the focus and identifying suitable Boolean search items and strings
Step 2:	Using the items and strings to identify an inclusive sample of meta-syntheses addressing the focus and identifying key concepts, themes and ideas as a basis for reducing the sample in relation to the focus
Step 3:	Exploring the use of concepts and the development of ideas in the selected (called primary) sample for consistencies, similarities and differences through reciprocal, refuational and synthesising analyses
Step 4:	Drawing and testing and an overarching interpretation against individual studies in the primary sample
Step 5:	Refining the interpretation into a narrative and testing it externally, against other national and international research by other authors Refining the research narrative and submitting it to peer-review for scientific publishing and broader dissemination relating to:
Step 6:	How to conceptualise the phenomenon of interest in the research Based on significant similarities and differences in the sample sTo provide an account of the major challenges to education justice and equality and how to research and overcome them

Table 2. Bibliographic details and basic data of individual corpus texts listed by number.

1. Beach, D. 2010. Socialisation and commercialisation in the restructuring of education and health professions in Europe: Questions of global class and gender. Current Sociology, 58: 551–569. Data: National ethnographic case study reports from seven European countries written as book chapters in one anthology and one EU report. Highlights common developments and signals the significant and important role of specific cycles of public to private transformation in production relations in service professions over the course of the last century and their consequences for social justice and equality. 2. Beach, D., and J. Lunneblad. 2011. Ethnographic Investigations of Issues of Race in Scandinavian Education Research. Ethnography and Education 6: 29–43. Data: Seven articles, three book chapters, two books, two doctoral theses related to race and ethnicity in education and educational ethnography in Scandinavia. 3. Beach, D., Dovemark, M., Schwartz, A., & Öhrn, E. 2013. Complexities and Contradictions of Education Inclusion. Nordic Studies in Education, 33: 254–268. Data: Ten articles, two book chapters, two books, three doctoral theses related to educational equity and integration, not the least with regard to the need and existence of alternative contexts for youth in which to valorise their class cultural capital and values as socially important and educationally significant in ways that schools fail to capitalise on. 4. Beach, D. 2017a. Personalisation and the Education Commodity: A Meta-ethnographic Analysis. Ethnography and Education, 12: 148–164. Data: Twenty-one articles, two book chapters, two books, six doctoral theses to generate a meta-ethnography of research about schools, school experiences and learning for marginalised youth following the recent (post-market) introduction of personalisation policies in Swedish schools 5. Beach, D. 2017b. Whose Justice is this! Capitalism, Class and Education Justice and Inclusion in the Nordic Countries: Race, Space and Class History. Educational Review, 9: 620–637. Data: Nine research articles, five book chapters, one book and eight doctoral theses about education justice, equity and inclusion in education systems that have often been claimed to be more just, equal, inclusive than most, specifically those of the Nordic countries. Shows these claims to be questionable and describes the education systems as ones that have promised justice, inclusion and equity for all in formal policy but in practice actually fail to do so. 6. Beach, D. 2018. Structural injustices in Swedish education. Palgrave MacMillan. Data: Five empirical chapters based on developments from five original research articles that examine Sweden’s school system using ethnographic and meta-ethnographic data and methodologies that uncover and try to explain the structural injustices at the heart of the education system. 7. Beach, D. From, T., Johansson, M. & Öhrn, E. 2018. Educational and Spatial Justice in Rural and Urban Areas in Nordic Countries: A Meta-ethnography, Education. Inquiry, 9: 4–21. Data: Twelve articles, three book chapters, three books, ten doctoral theses to present a contextualising narrative account of spatial justice and injustice in the education systems in three Nordic countries. 8. Beach, D. and Öhrn, E. 2019. Closing Discussion. In E. Öhrn and D. Beach (Eds.), Young People’s Life and Schooling in Rural Areas, 139–153. London: Tufnell Press. Data: Six empirical chapters from six rural schools and their communities on social class and education relations in six rural communities. Explores how schooling marginalises local rural knowledge and leads rural populations to be ‘schooled’ through exposure to a, for them, culturally insensitive curriculum. 9. Beach, D., & Vigo-Arrazola, B. (2021). Critical Ethnographies of Education and for Social and Educational Transformation: A Meta-Ethnography, Qualitative Inquiry, 27(6): 677–688. Data: Thirty articles, one book chapter, two doctoral theses analysed to attempt to identify and explore cases where researchers have overcome the reluctance toward activism and transformation, what characterized these efforts and what seemed to support their success. 10. Beach, D. 2022. Exploitation of working class values, identities and labour-power in Sweden’s comprehensive school extension and neo-liberal reforms, Educational Review, 74: 1205–1223. Data: Thirteen articles, three chapters, two theses used to consider how educational reforms between 1940 and 1990 in Sweden claimed but failed to contribute to social justice, equity and equality, and how neoliberal market reforms from the early 1990s onwards led to further decreased relative education equity.

Table 3. Main themes in individual corpus texts relating to justice and equality.

1. Presence of a neoliberal convergence, its modes of development and negative consequences for justice and equity. Social class differences in the history of education and care. The dialectics of neo-liberal reform and economic exploitation. 2. How issues of race and ethnicity and the relationships in education between Scandinavians and (im)migrants are represented and researched in educational ethnography in Scandinavia. 3. Growing up in disadvantaged neighbourhoods with high rates of poverty, joblessness and multi-dimensional poverty in stereo-typed urban contexts and territorial stigmatisation. 4. Tensions between personalisation and privatisation policies with justice and equity. Continued social reproduction in education and its curriculum relations. Policy mismatch. 5. False ideology, policy mismatch. Negative consequences from turn to market politics by worsening but not originating education injustice and inequality. 6. Myth of educational equality. Racial/ethnic, social class and other multiple structural injustices at the heart of the education system and education politics. 7. False ideology about rural areas and peri-urban suburbs as ‘backward and negative towards education’. Spatial injustice. 8. Neglect of rural perspectives and differences, class and gender. History of material exploitation and the external control of conditions of economic production. 9. Mechanisms of schooling and differentiation based on performances in racially and class biased curriculum. Normalising ideology and hierarchy-legitimising myths that stabilise oppression. 10. Operational stereotypes in relation to educational attainment. Racism. Historical continuity of capitalist oppression and exploitation. Reform failure.

Table 4. Main themes in corpus texts about researching for justice and transformation.

1. Analysis of and engagement in hegemonic struggles over education control and symbolically mediated interactions between habitus and social structure within relations of domination. 2. Need for a critical analysis of the use of the term (im)migrant(s) instead of race and and/or languages for understanding the politics of race and ethnicity in relation to education. 3. Lived experiences and community participation, giving voice, taking perspective, advocacy and intellectual engagement. 4. Embedded lived experiences and community participation, giving voice, taking perspective, advocacy and intellectual engagement. Policy ontology and historical contextualisation. 5. Immanent criticism and linked historical material and critical policy analysis. Embeddedness and co-analysis. Empowerment through engagement and trust. Forming new alliances. 6. Treating the ruling class hegemony as threatening analytically, through clear communication ‘upwards’ and engaging in political discourse, collaboration and alliance. Activism. 7. Involvement and long-term engagement of the researcher in everyday life. Learning from participants and interactions with them in context. Challenging the myth of common schooling. 8. Uncovering the differences between schooling and an empowering rural education. Embeddedness and advocacy for education and against urban-centred schooling. 9. Embeddedness and interaction to gain and use knowledge to engage with people in processes of change in the interests of education justice. Historical awareness as an organic intellectual. 10. Empowerment of communities as the subjects of their own research as praxis. The challenges and potential contractions of immanent criticism methods and critique of ideology.

Beach, D., and B. Vigo-Arrazola. 2021. “Critical Ethnographies of Education and for Social and Educational Transformation: A Meta-Ethnography.” Qualitative Inquiry 27 (6): 677–688. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800420935916.

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