The University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and the Center for Urban Ethnography will celebrate the 42nd convening of the Ethnography in Education Research Forum, one of the most longstanding and renowned scholarly venues for this intellectual tradition, on February 26th and 27th, 2021. This year’s theme focuses on the complexities associated with race and inequity that have historically defined social systems in the U.S. and globally.
Ethnographic research has created interdisciplinary pathways to think expansively about how culture is understood, entwined with related concepts, and revised to weigh critical questions of race, racism, and multiple forms of inequality. Ethnographic scholarship has examined the everyday lives, hardships, and forms of resistance within historically marginalized communities and has provided nuanced analyses that delineate the intersections of these issues with problems of educational access and social (in)equity. The 2020 protests and uprisings, most notably Black Lives Matter, remind us—as a field and as members of society—that the problems of systemic racism are longstanding, persistent, and woven into the fabric of education. They also urge us to move forward boldly, directing and refining our scholarship to advance the uncoupling of structural barriers for students, their families, and communities and to bring about new educational dispositions.
We welcome submissions from researchers, scholars, and practitioners across disciplines and fields whose work draws on ethnographic-focused methods and education, defined broadly and examines the role of ethnography in unpacking the problems of racial justice and the ethical dilemmas they produce. Sessions for the Forum will highlight forward-thinking agendas that elevate the possibilities to imagine and reimagine educational research, scholarship, practice, and policy.
In 2021, the Forum will be an online, invited program, in response to the face-to-face constraints imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The program will include 12 to 15 invited group presentations, e.g., panels, symposia, Views-by-Two, speaker with respondents, and other formats with two or more participants. Presentation proposals will be peer reviewed, and those with the highest scores will be invited. Presentations should consider the wide range of ethnographic-focused inquiry and research options that highlight the historical issues of race that have continued into the present and the role of ethnography in capturing both their complexity and the possibilities for education research to address them.
We are fortunate to have several outstanding plenary speakers, including Eve Ewing, recipient of the 2020 Book Award. We will have a full and engaging schedule over the two days and opportunities for participants to interact in small discussion sessions, online exhibits, and other interactive formats.
In the tradition of the Pre-Forum Seminar on Culture and Race with Emerging Scholars, created in 1990, an online Invited Youth Research Forum with high school youth will take place on Thursday, February 25th, 2021. Youth will present work focused on social problems facing diverse communities, issues of race, and civic engagement.
The format for the 2021 Forum program, while different than past years, will open up a range of opportunities to share knowledge and work toward contributing to new discourses and possibilities in the current precarious moment in U.S. and global communities.