Multi-sited ethnography and the field of educational research

Abstract

This paper responds to the challenge of how educational research might be practised in a contemporary world that is no longer necessarily organised by nearness and unity. Focusing on ethnography, it argues for what a multi-sited imaginary contributes to research in the field of education. By giving prominence to the notion of multi-sited ethnography as it has been developed by the anthropologist George Marcus this paper shows how ethnography conceived this way is now necessary in educational research. By bringing together recent concepts from anthropology with educational ethnography, it provides an analysis and reconstruction of how to go about doing ethnography in a world that is characterised by partial connections. To highlight the contributions to education of this research imaginary the paper provides an example of how to approach a specific research topic in this field. In sum, this paper makes a unique contribution to educational research by providing an ethnographic approach for the study of contemporary educational lives.

Keywords:

• educational ethnography
• fieldwork
• Marcus
• multi-sited ethnography
• violence

Acknowledgements

Thanks to David Beckett and Barbara Kameniar for supervising the thesis from which this paper extends. Thanks also to Marie Brennan and Georgina Tsolidis for responding to my thesis and making suggestions, some of which I have tried to include in this paper.