Ethnography, which has been considered as the methodological approach of Anthropology, consists on “the recording and analysis of a culture or society, usually based on participant-observation and resulting in a written account of a people, place or institution” (Simpson and Coleman 2017, also see Howell, 2018). This approach implies, at least, four movements: a conceptual frame, recording what happens on the field through multimodal field notes and diaries, its analysis, and the narration of all this process (Hernández-Hernández and Sancho-Gil, 2018). Under this frame “Theory, writing, and ethnography are inseparable material practices. Together they create the conditions that locate the social inside the text.” (Denzin, 1997, p. xii). However, as the focus on this symposium is on the process of analysis, building on a research project, which aim was to explore six (primary and secondary) schools transforming cultures, we want to put under discussion the tradition of applying analytical procedures on ‘data’ taking from the field. Instead of this approach we want to share the implications of considering the assumptions made by St. Pierre (1997) who has referred to the post-structural ethnography as a “site of passage... a provisional space, one coded as soon as it is imagined, yet mobile, nomadic – always a mixture of the striated and the smooth” (St. Pierre 1997, p. 276). This notion has consequences for the so called ‘analysis’ because “[W]riting is thinking, writing is analysis, writing is indeed a seductive and tangled method of discovery” (Richardson and St. Pierre, 2017, p. 1423, emphasis in the original). Under this approach a theory of writing is also a theory of analysis and interpretation “by using writing to think; that is, (to write our way) into particular spaces (we) could not have occupied by sorting data with a computer program or by analytic induction” (Richardson and St. Pierre, 2017, 1428).
