Critical Ethnography

History

Critical ethnography is a relatively new research methodology. However, critical ethnography has its roots in the well-established tradition of anthropological ethnography. Critical ethnography grew out of dissatisfaction with both the atheoretical stance of traditional ethnography, which ignored social structures such as class, patriarchy, and racism, and what some regarded as the overly deterministic and theoretical approaches of critical theory, which ignored the lived experience and agency of human actors.

In the Chicago School, traditional ethnographers were beginning to examine critical issues by researching subordinate populations and shifting the focus from individual experience to cultural dominance and marginalization. In Britain, a “new” sociology produced prototypes for a dialectical representation of structure and agency.

In parallel with sociology and cultural studies, critical ethnography was being taken up in education. Here critical ethnography was positioned as the convergence of traditional ethnography and composition pedagogy, providing a new sociology of education that highlighted both neo-Marxist and interactionist perspectives. These shifts occurred from the 1970s onward in both North America and Europe, producing differing accounts of what constituted qualitative methodology—and, within this, ethnography and critical ethnography—and how they should be practiced. During the past decade, however, advances in the description and application of critical ethnography have produced a more coherent account.

The most notable publications influencing the uptake and development of critical ethnography have been Jim Thomas's Doing Critical Ethnography, which outlined the theoretical underpinnings of critical ethnography, and Phil Carspecken's Critical Ethnography in Educational Research, which provided a methodological theory of critical ethnography accompanied by empirical techniques, data, and findings.

Carspecken's work has been most influential. In his text, Carspecken drew on the work of Joe Kinchloe and Peter McLaren, who outlined the assumptions shared by critical researchers. These include assumptions that inequality exists in society, mainstream practices often reproduce inequalities, oppression occurs in many forms and is most forceful when it involves hegemonic learning, and critical research should engage in social criticism to support efforts for change. These assumptions mirror the tenets of critical ethnography regarding both the nature of reality and the ethics or purpose of such research.

The philosophical approach that underpins critical ethnography stems from the historical debates regarding the role and function of qualitative research. There has been a shift away from positivism toward methods that accommodate negotiated meanings and the power differentials inherent in research relationships. To this end, critical ethnography is openly ideological and is often at odds with both the objective positivists and relativist constructivists. To outline a research stance that can accommodate both negotiated meaning and the existence of larger social structures, great attention must be paid to the philosophical issues of ontology, epistemology, and the validity of critical ethnographic research.

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