Call for Papers

7th Rethinking Educational Ethnography Conference

Rethinking platforms for teaching ethnography: facing changing conceptualizations of culture and challenges from post-materialist philosophy, globalization, and mobile modernity

Budapest, 1-2 June 2018

Organized by the Faculty of Education and Psychology of Eötvös Loránd University and the Hungarian Pedagogical Association.

This conference developed from a long discussion that began in Helsinki at the ECER 2010 conference, where participating researchers discussed emerging concerns about virtual ethnography and discovered a shared interest. Since then, six international conferences were organized in Boras, Helsinki, Porto, Barcelona, Napoli, Copenhagen and Klaipeda. Each year, participants discussed an important topic related to ethnographic epistemology and methodology. The seventh international conference builds on the traditions of the previous Rethinking Ethnography meetings in collaboration with the European Educational Research Association (EERA) Network 19. This year’s conference focuses on the challenges for teaching ethnography. In several European countries, educational ethnography has had a long standing and robust tradition with acknowledged experts and interested new students, while in some others, particularly in Eastern Europe, it is a relatively new methodology that are used by a few and often younger scholars. Although in different ways, but in both contexts the instruction of doing ethnography is faced with several challenges: the neoliberal context of budget cuts on research funding and the race for publications, the low prestige of ethnography in the field of education science, and particularly the new, and changing conceptualizations of culture. The traditional concepts of culture and its inquiry are challenged by trends of post-materialist and post-modern approaches, and by the conditions of globalization and mobile modernity. Educational ethnographers realize the consequences of these changes in the field of teaching and learning. In such continuous change, ethnographers should find adaptive ways of teaching ethnography and transmitting the methodology, while ethnography in itself, compared to other scientific methods, is neither a methodology easy to acquire, nor it is a one-directional process of teaching the juniors: every ethnographer has to learn new ways of doing research. Ethnographic research on teaching and learning can inform this process of continuous learning.   

The conference calls for submissions from doctoral students and more experienced/seasoned ethnographic scholars. We welcome submissions that discuss completed studies, field work, theoretical considerations, or work in progress, reflections about teaching and learning ethnographic methodology. We specifically invite paper proposals, which address one or several of the following issues:

• ·        teaching about ethnography and teaching ethnography: the academic space for ethnography and the difficult path of acquiring a changing methodology
• ·        changing platforms for teaching and learning ethnography: new ways, alternative methods, different experiences and interpretational frameworks
• ·        doing/teaching and learning ethnography in different geo-political contexts
• ·        the specificities of Eastern European academia in relation to ethnography, the dynamics of centre, semi-periphery and periphery;
• ·        neoliberal challenges for ethnographic research and its transmission
• ·        post-modern and post-materialist philosophy and learning ethnography
• ·        learning new methods to study teaching and learning in the context of globalization and mobile modernity

The special tradition of this conference is that it accepts only a limited number of papers (this year max. 30) and facilitates the dialog among the participants in relation to the topics raised in the papers. Once approved, a short paper with a minimum of 2000 words or the presentation of the paper must be submitted (you can choose between paper or presentation). These papers/presentation will be shared with all delegates prior to the conference with an intention to save time on presentations and dedicate more time for debate and discussion.

You can download here the PDF version of the Call for Papers with deadlines, fee and contact information.