Ethnographic seriality: research grappling with issues of time

Henderson, Robyn and Woods, Annette (2012) Ethnographic seriality: research grappling with issues of time. In: Joint International Conference of the Australian Association for Research in Education and the Asia Pacific Educational Research Association (AARE 2012): Regional and Global Cooperation in Educational Research, 2-6 Dec 2012, Sydney, Australia.

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Abstract

Today's educational researchers live and work in a world that seems to be reminiscent of James Gleick's (2000) book Faster: The acceleration of just about everything. Time poverty has become the norm and academics generally work under enormous pressures in their attempts to respond to both institutional and external demands for high performance. It is probably not surprising, then, that there are likely to be effects on the types of research that are conducted. In particular, educational ethnography in the tradition of, for example, Shirley Brice Heath's (1983) initial ten year study of Ways with Words: Language, life, and work in communities and classrooms has become problematic for research beyond initial doctoral research programs.
This paper considers current ethnographic research and the use of longitudinality (e.g. Weis, 2004) and time-scales (e.g. Lemke, 2000; Compton-Lilly, 2011) as ways of exploring people's lives over time. Drawing on the authors' experiences of doing literacy research in schools, the paper works with the notion of seriality. It considers the implications and possibilities of data collection as a serial process, conducted at time intervals, as an alternative to spending extended periods of time in the field. It also discusses ethical considerations related to returning to research sites, and the problematics of reporting data findings and working with participants in ways that balance benefice and risk appropriately. The paper works to unpack ethnographic seriality and its implications for ethnography as a method.

Statistics for this ePrint Item

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Commonwealth Reporting Category E) (Paper)
Refereed:	No
Item Status:	Live Archive
Additional Information:	AARE does not ask for copyright of refereed papers – copyright remains vested with the author.
Faculty/School / Institute/Centre:	Historic - Faculty of Education (Up to 30 June 2013)
Faculty/School / Institute/Centre:	Historic - Faculty of Education (Up to 30 June 2013)
Date Deposited:	07 Jun 2013 02:59
Last Modified:	15 Sep 2017 03:54
Fields of Research (2008):	15 Commerce, Management, Tourism and Services > 1503 Business and Management > 150301 Business Information Management (incl. Records, Knowledge and Information Management, and Intelligence) 17 Psychology and Cognitive Sciences > 1701 Psychology > 170103 Educational Psychology 22 Philosophy and Religious Studies > 2201 Applied Ethics > 220107 Professional Ethics (incl. police and research ethics)
Socio-Economic Objectives (2008):	E Expanding Knowledge > 97 Expanding Knowledge > 970113 Expanding Knowledge in Education
URI:	http://eprints.usq.edu.au/id/eprint/23581

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