Session Information
19 SES 03, Parallel Paper Session
Paper Session
Contribution
This paper will combine two purposes: in the first place, it will report on the general methodological implications for ethnography of education of some of the papers presented at the international research seminar on Space, Place and Social Justice which was organised by the author, sponsored by EERA network 19 (ethnography), and held at Manchester Metropolitan University in 2012. Secondly, it will develop a related methodological discussion prompted by the author's own doctoral ethnographic study of young people's disaffection from school in a de-industrialised UK coal mining community (see Bright 2012, for example). The first part of the paper, the seminar report, will highlight the scope of work presented at the Manchester event, considering the influence of work on space and place in human geography and how it troubles ideas of field, site, data, narrative and representation in ethnography. There will be a short discussion of two discernible threads and their potential impact on ethnography. These are: a rekindled interest in the work of Lefebvre (see Lefebvre,1991) and a burgeoning recognition of the "cartographic" work of Guattari. The second part of the paper - prompted by the Manchester seminar - will focus on the methodological limits of ethnography's capacity to respond either epistemologically or representationally to the affective turn (Clough, 2007) in social theory. Recent important work in sociology of education (Reay, 2005;Shildrick et al 2009; Skeggs and Loveday, 2012;Taylor, 2012) geography (Mitchell, 2005; McDowell, 2008; Anderson, 2009) and critical psychology (Walkerdine and Jimenez, 2012. Wetherell, 2012) has raised the importance of a method that can adequately apprehend the spatialised circulation and transmission of affect (Brennan, 2004) as it relates to experiences of social class and education. In a discussion emerging from his own doctoral work, the author argues that ethnography is methodologically best placed to explore this territory and goes on to consider what an ethnography of the "spatialities of affect" (Thrift, 2008) or "structure[s] of feeling" (Williams, 1975, 1977) might look like. In doing so, the author mobilises Edensor's notion of the "industrial ruin" (Edensor, 2005) and considers the epistemological and representational challenge that it poses. In the light of that, the paper concludes by considering the potential fruitfulness of a revisioning of critical ethnography (Foley, 2002) towards a rapprochement between two apparently incommensurable possible trajectories for ethnography of education after the affective turn in social theory. The first discernible trajectory is one which seeks to describe the lived, psychosocial economies of "affective practices" (Wetherell, 2012). The second deploys a "ficto-critical" ethnographic poetics that roams "‘from one texted genre to another – romantic, realist, historical, fantastic, sociological, surreal" (Stewart, 1996, 210) in an attempt to register what Kathleen Stewart has recently articulated as the "atmospheric attunements" of "ordinary affects" (Stewart, 2007 and 2010 respectively)
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Anderson, B. 2009. Affective atmospheres. In Emotion, space and society. 2. 77-81 Brennan, T. 2004. The transmission of affect. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Bright, N.G. 2012. ‘Sticking together!’ Policy activism from within a former UK coal-mining community. In Journal of education administration and history. 44: 3. 221-236. Clough, P.T. 2007. The affective turn: Theorising the social. Durham and London: Duke University Press Edensor, T. 2005. Industrial ruins: Space, aesthetics and materiality, Oxford and New York: Berg. Foley, D. 2002. Critical ethnography: The reflexive turn. In Qualitative studies in education. 15: 5. 469-490. Lefebvre, H. 1991. The production of space. Trans. D. Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell. Mitchell, D. 2005. Working-class geographies: Capital, space and place. In Russo J. and Linkon S. 2005. (Eds) New working class studies. Ithaca: Cornell Reay, D. 2005 . Beyond Consciousness? : The Psychic Landscape of Social Class. In Sociology. 39: 911- 928 Shildrick, T., Blackman S. and MacDonald, R. 2009. Young people, class and place. In Journal of Youth Studies. 12: 5. 457-465. Skeggs B. and Loveday, V. 2012. Struggles for value: value practices, injustice, judgment, affect and the idea of class. In The British Journal of Sociology. 63:472-490 Stewart, K. 1996. A Space on the side of the road. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Stewart, K. 2007. Ordinary affects. Durham NC and London: Duke University Press Stewart, K. 2010 Atmospheric Attunements. In Rubric. 1 Taylor, Y. 2012. Fitting into Place. Farnham and Burlington VT: Ashgate Thrift, N. 2008e. Spatialities of feeling. In N. Thrift Non-representational theory: space/politics/affect. London and New York: Routledge. 171-195 Walkerdine, V. and Jimenez, L. 2012. Gender, work and community after de-industrialisation: A psychosocial approach to affect. Houndhills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan Wetherell, Margaret. 2012. Affect and emotion: A new social science understanding. London, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
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