34th Annual Ethnography in Education Research Forum

Ethnography as Counter Narrative:
Reclaiming the Local in Educational Policy & Practice

ABOUT the 2013 Forum

Ethnography has a long tradition of seeking to understand and represent voices that are unheard, misunderstood, or minoritized. With the increased emphasis worldwide on high-stakes testing and top-down accountability standards in education has come a greater interest on the part of ethnographers and participatory action researchers to honor and reclaim local knowledge production and acts of resistance to dominant ways of knowing and doing in education. Such instantiations, and their reporting by ethnographers, can contribute counter narratives – narratives that push against normative stories about individuals and groups in education.

At the same time, uncovering, hearing, finding, and promoting local knowledge and local activism are not necessarily straightforward processes. Reflexive inquiry into the practice of ethnography demands awareness of some of the inherent tensions in striving to conduct activist-oriented research: conflicts between researchers’ own biases and worldviews and those of research participants, the potential artificiality of framing narratives as “counter,” and questions around who has access to the means and modes of official knowledge production.

The 34th Ethnography Forum invites researchers to share the narratives of lives which are lived as counter narratives and models of social activism, and to make visible the contradictions and tensions—as well as the promise and potential—in ethnographic research as counter-narrative.