Identifying and comparing Scandinavian ethnography: comparisons and influences

In recent years, there has been a significant growth in the volume of research production in education ethnography in Scandinavia due partly to a regionally financed network. The present article makes some comparisons between Scandinavian and other education research contexts in relation to aspects of general ethnographic design to try to analyse this production. It suggests some typical points of identity for Scandinavian educational ethnography, such as a distinct role for theories in fieldwork. But it also suggests that these characteristics are even apparent outside Scandinavia. Some blind-spots in ethnography are also suggested around quantitative aspects, but again, these are not unique. Scandinavian ethnographic research in education is broadly influenced by a range of different traditions in different parts of the region that have travelled with key people and from place to place, but it is also noted that there is seepage between ethnography and other traditions. Keywords: timespacetheorytradition Notes 1. These principles and emphases are present in theses and examples of educational ethnography from Scandinavian researchers in international journals, such as Ethnography and Education (e.g., Forsberg Citation2007; Hagelund Citation2007; Lappalainen Citation2008; Moinian Citation2006; Tholander Citation2007; Thornberg Citation2007). A lot of this production can be traced to the NorFa network effects. But they were laid down much earlier than this, in collaboration in courses in anthropological design in educational research involving Jean Lave and Steinar Kvale in the early 1990s (Chaiklin and Lave Citation1996; Lave and Kvale Citation1995), in courses given in Uppsala and Gothenburg by Stephan Ball in the mid 1980s and in the Bourdieu influenced anthropological research conducted in Copenhagen from the 1980s onwards influenced by Staff Callewaert. 2. The balance of this 'halfway house' (Willis and Trondman, 2000, 10) lies in a conscious planning and design that connects up theoretical insights, concepts and tools in order to carve out relevant sensitising dimensions of social theories that still remain sufficiently open and plastic to be able to register something unexpected in an ongoing dialogue between knowledge produced by specialist educational sciences and the practical common sense and self-reflexivity of education culture and praxis (Borgnakke, Citation1996). This dialectic meeting between emic and etic dimensions helps produce evocative and imaginative answers to key analytical questions. 3. According to Jeffrey and Troman (2004), a recurrent design mode samples temporal phases on a regular, predetermined basis, not as in a snapshot or a zooming-in approach, but in order to ascertain and compare similarities and differences in respect of how particular processes, events, perspectives, practices and behaviour change temporally. It is an opportunity to provide data about change in an institution or in a group of individuals and their practices. 4. Fangen's point here is that although full objectivity is not possible, we must try nevertheless to obtain an as impartial a perspective on cultural data as possible and also openly acknowledge and clearly discuss our sources of bias and what they mean when reporting research results. Whenever the intention is to produce ideas and then develop and test them at increasing levels of practical detail and theoretical and empirical generality, people will want to know in what way interview and other information is representative and Scandinavian educational ethnographers do not always make this explicit. They often either defer the question or avoid it. This deferral is though far from exclusive to educational ethnography Scandinavia, reading with Pring (Citation2000).