The meeting will be held during the weekend of February 23-24, 2018 and will center around the theme: Whose Knowledge Counts? Research and Practice in Critical Times. Invited sessions will be uniquely structured to allow a conversation about both substantive domains, and how the “EthnoFest” can best provide a space for nurturing future scholars, practitioners, activists, educators, students, filmmakers and community partners.
As there are only 100 open seats for attendance this year, participants are encouraged to participate in the full range of innovative activities on both days. Some details about the programming are available below, and a PDF of the program is available here.
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At this year’s gathering, we will consider together how the Forum and CAMRA can continue to nurture creative socially-engaged ethnographic work among a new generation of scholars, practitioners, activists, students, filmmakers, and community partners.
The traditional Annual Ethnography in Education Research Forum/Practitioner Inquiry Day will resume in spring 2019. A call for papers will be circulated and posted on this website in summer 2018.
Kathy Hall
Associate Professor
Jasmine Blanks Jones
OreOluwa Badaki, Osei Alleyne, Gordon "Dee" Asaah, Carmen Delgado, Jessica Peng, Rachael Stephens, Bethany Monea, Nora Gross, Tali Rosen, Marisa Gonzalez
Suzanne Oh
H. Gerald Campano
Associate Professor
We aim to create more democratic dialogue with the recognition and appreciation for the deep knowledge each participant brings to our discussion. Therefore, we ask that you join with us in opening up the space by flattening differences that can hinder the flow of conversation. These are just a few ideas, but they should change based on who is in the room!
Each session will have a variety of panelists including an academic, a community practitioner or activist, and an artist or multimodal specialist.
Each session may have an Open Seat intended for an audience member to join the main discussion at any time. Other forms of audience participation will be experimental.
At registration, you will notice that name badges only list names, not affiliations, ranks or titles. Given the spirit of this year’s EthnoFest -- and our overarching commitment to problematizing traditional power dynamics in academic knowledge production -- we made the decision to avoid using any honorifics (whether gendered titles, like ‘Ms.’ or ‘Mr,’ or those that indicate social standing/position, like ‘Doctor’ or ‘Dr.’) or any institutional affiliations. While we genuinely respect the work and experience that such titles often indicate, we have found that they can tacitly reinforce the tendency to privilege academic knowledge production at the expense of other forms of knowledge production. We hope everyone will feel like this decision helps generate a more egalitarian, transgressive space.
The Ethnography in Education Research Forum, convened by the Center for Urban Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education (Penn GSE) every year since 1980, is the largest annual meeting of qualitative researchers in education. The Forum excels in nurturing ethnographic research and researchers in schools. The Forum is known for its friendly and supportive atmosphere for fledgling researchers and for the spirit of relaxed and open dialogue embracing newcomers and experienced researchers alike. Areas of emphasis include: multicultural issues in education, practitioner/teacher/action research, critical and feminist ethnography, ethnographic evaluation in education, language issues in education, uses of ethnography in math and science, and indigenous language revitalization.
Marilyn Cochran-Smith and Susan L. Lytle –both assistant professors at Penn GSE at the time – initiated practitioner Inquiry Day in 1987 in response to the burgeoning U.S. and international interest in teacher research, action research, critical action research, and participatory research. From the beginning, the intent of Practitioner Inquiry Day was to provide a space for educators to share their research in various formats, including papers, symposia, data sessions, informal group discussions, and more.
University of Pennsylvania
Graduate School of Education
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6216
cue@gse.upenn.edu
