This paper derives from the author's doctoral research, a study of adult education practice in museums, informed by a critical theory perspective. More specifically, it will present critical ethnography as an appropriate method in researching learning in non-formal adult educational contexts, such as museums. The study uses a multiple case study method, by examining four museums/ galleries and their adult educational offer in the city of Dundee, Scotland. It investigates the values underlying this offer, its take-up, impacts and a number of key questions, including the ways 'habitus' affects the way adults learn in museums and museums' place in the field of non-formal adult education provision in Dundee. Critical ethnography has an interest in exploring those particular phenomena that social agents take for granted. Paul Willis, one of the celebrated exponents of critical ethnography, insisted on the need to consider the theoretical background which cannot be directly derived from the field of inquiry. Willis gave this approach the acronym TIES: Theoretically Informed Ethnographic Study . According to Willis, TIES adapts ethnographic writing to take into account larger issues of political economy and wider vistas of representation. This study, rooted in a very specific theoretical framework, utilises critical ethnographic research tools, which take into account the historically given circumstances within which the subjects act. The paper will offer appropriate examples of the interpretation of some of the findings after completion of the first six months of the fieldwork, trying to sketch the ways critical ethnography has cast light on the research questions and perhaps opening new questions for the possibility of conducting fieldwork under a new, more holistic, prism.