In an ambitious effort of two big volumes Werner and Schoepfle (1986; Werner and Schoepfle 1987) once suggested what they called ‘Systematic Fieldwork’. The first volume was addressing the foundations of participant observation and interviewing, the second volume was concerned with ‘ethnographic data analysis and data management’. Such clear-cut and comprising approaches to frame the ethnographic crowd and to discipline its scientific work have become rare today. Nowadays we see all kind of studies claiming to be ethnographic. Besides the classics like symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology and practice theories, the ethnography of communication, symbolic anthropology, ethnoscience and others, we furthermore have to find our way through poststructuralist and post-qualitative ethnographies and the impositions of new materialism. And even old hands of the trade of educational ethnography, like e.g. Walford (2018) are broadening the approach further by declaring “ethnography is not qualitative”. What this all means for educational ethnography becomes more and more unclear and sometimes even obscure (Hammersley 2017). In my contribution I will briefly argue that educational ethnography has become a discursive field (Keller 2012) and has become more than a just a method from the shelf. Educational ethnography constitutes an array of theories, disciplines and linguistic traditions which only selectively blend together and sometimes even contradict (see: Maeder 2018). Looked at it this way educational ethnography becomes a discursive context in which we find a struggle for local truth. And the different strands of educational ethnography are identified by what counts as data and how the analysis of such data is done. Within such discursive strands the notion of what is possible and being acceptable gets limited down to quite narrow possibilities. I will illustrate this by showing a fragment of data (a photography) and its analysis. And will give a description of how this data guided the way into and through the field and created more and different data.

Hammersley, Martyn. 2017. “What is ethnography? Can it survive? Should it?” Ethnography and Education. 1-17. Keller, Reiner. 2012. Doing Discourse Research: An Introduction for Social Scientists. London: SAGE Publications. Maeder, Christoph. 2018. “What Can Be Learnt?: Educational Ethnography, the Sociology of Knowledge, and Ethnomethodology.” Pp. 135-151 in The Wiley Handbook of Ethnography of Education, Wiley Handbooks in Education, edited by Dennis Beach, Carl Bagley, and Sofia Marques da Silva. Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell. Walford, Geoffrey. 2018. “Ethnography is not qualitative.” Ethnography and Education. online. Werner, Oswald and Mark G. Schoepfle. 1986. Systematic Fieldwork. Foundations of Ethnography and Interviewing. Newbury Park, London, New Dehli: SAGE Publications. ———. 1987. Systematic Fieldwork. Ethnographic Analysis and Data Management. Newbury Park, London, New Dehli: SAGE Publications.