What does it mean when an ethnographer intervenes?

Abstract

This paper explores what it means to engage as an ethical researcher in the conduct of critical ethnography. During the years in which this critical ethnography of new language learners in a midwestern high school, the ethnographer actively participated in the life of the site. This paper poses the question of what such active involvement means for research ethics. Much of the literature on research ethics deals with Internal Review Boards standards, but this paper takes a reflective, ethnographic look at the researcher's own ethical practices in order to articulate and examine the underlying principles entailed in the decisions to intervene or not in the ongoing life of the site.

Keywords:

• critical ethnography
• ethics
• research practice
• democratic methods

Notes

1. I will use the term Latino when speaking in my own voice because most of the youth at the school designated as ‘Hispanic’ preferred this label if there was to be a broad label used (may preferred just the national label, but teachers often thought all of the Latino kids were from Mexico. Teachers and Administrators tended to use the word Hispanic to refer to this same group. The mix-match of labels in this paper reflects their varied use at the site. The same kind of complexity was associated with students who were variously called ‘white’, ‘Caucasion’, ‘traditional’, ‘local’ and ‘our’. This complexity is retained in the language of the paper.

2. I was so angry at her response, and yet I appreciated the outcome and I understood how vulnerable she felt to the politics of the town.