This paper grounds on the experience of doing community-based ethnography since 1999 involving formal and non-formal education contexts, in online and offline contexts, mainly with young people, and in vulnerable settings, located both in urban and border regions. We will explore “being out there” has implicating the availability of the ethnographer be confronted with personal transformations and the impossibility of staying the same (Fernandes, 2003) regarding change his/her own perspective about a specific population, education and social phenomena, but also about methodological options at the same time that we put out there our own positioning. This contribution will be empirically grounded in fieldnotes from different ethnographic studies in which we have been involved in the past 20 years. We will pay a particular attention to the fieldwork developed in border regions in the past 10 years that included online and offline settings and its role in supporting the development of other data collection instruments, namely quantitative ones, as well as sustaining local interpretations of large scale data and results, to provide research contexts with relevant conclusions.

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