Ethnography is understood as the systematic study of people and cultures, with the aim of exploring cultural phenomena in which the researcher observes society from the point of view of the subject of the study. The ethnography of education focuses on social science questions, using education as an arena for studying basic issues in culture. It has always worked with multiple perspectives, prioritizing sustained first-hand engagement in the lives of a group of people (Maeder, 2018).

New times have brought new challenges. Globalization has brought the need for careful studies not only within but also across groups, levels, spaces, and times. Anthropologists and ethnographers therefore move away from studying bounded or distinctive groups exclusively in order to study culture as composed of circulating and often contentious symbols and logics that are taken up and re-purposed in on-going social practices and across social and geographic boundaries. To advance the ethnography of education in new times, not only do we need to cross borders and become more global in line with mobile modernity, we also need to get outside the classroom and school more than in the past.

There is also an emergence of new modalities of multi-scalarity, network ethnography, sensory ethnography and ethnographies of visual and on-line-off-line cultures that enable researchers or teams to cover more sites and compare more differences than before. On the other hand, “the concept of educational ethnography is now well established, but research conditions have changed in the past decade as have societies” (Beach, Bagley, Marques da Silva, 2018).

This was the rationale of the he Winter School “Ethnography Unbound: Responding to Late Modernity’s Mobilities and Challenges, organised by the participants in this panel with the support of EERA, in Barcelona, December 12th to 14th, 2018. We identified what cutting edge research and researchers in ethnography of education have said and above all concerning what the new research conditions mean for practices. Thoroughly discussed with participants the most stimulating and disturbing issues for them, such as the inabarcability of knowledge configuring educational cultures; the emerging methods beyond interviews and observation (Hernández-Hernández & Sancho-Gil, 2018), the weight of inertial academic cultures; the power relationships; the lack of funds and collaborative research cultures; the multiplicity of ethical issues, etc. All that in a moment in need  of redefining “ethnographic work as an event and not as a normative procedure aimed at unveiling a culture. The ethnographic encounter is a particular social relationship that is staged within a given cultural framework. Its objective is not the procedural description of a culture, but the experience of mise en scène to which a set of methods, representations and categorizations are subjected when performed within a cultural process” (Martínez, 2019).

The panel will re-discuss the processes and results of the WS, taking into account participants feedback, and interchange our experience in accompanying young scholars’ formation from our respective academic culture.

M. Begoña Vigo-Arrazola will refer to her experience in advising and tutoring master and doctoral students. Christoph Meader will participate as a long-time teacher of ethnographic research methods with master and doctoral students in different countries. Fernando Hernández-Hernández will build on his experience in forming master students in ethnography from a performative perspective. Dennis Beach, as compiler of an international handbook on the ethnography of education and long-time teacher, will be focus on “getting critical in ethnography of education at times of global capitalist austerity: from survival to revolution”. Juana M. Sancho-Gil will share her background in introducing young scholars in ethnography as master, doctoral students and participants in projects implemented by the research group she coordinated for more than 20 years.

Beach, D. Bagley, Marques da Silva, S. (2018). Ethnography of Education: Thinking Forward, Looking Back. In D. Beach, C. Bagley, & S. Marques da Silva (eds),The Wiley Handbook of Ethnography of Education (pp. 515-532). London and New York: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing. Hernández-Hernández, F., & Sancho-Gil, J. (2018-06-25). Writing and Managing Multimodal. Field Notes. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.319 Martínez, S. (2019). Violencia global y conocimiento cultural. http://campoderelampagos.org/critica-y-reviews/20/1/2019. Retrieved 20-01-2019. Maeder, C. (2018). What Can Be Learnt? Educational Ethnography, the Sociology of Knowledge,and Ethnomethodology. In D. Beach, C. Bagley, & S. Marques da Silva (eds),The Wiley Handbook of Ethnography of Education (pp. 135-150). London and New York: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing.