Critical Ethnographies of Education and for Social and Educational Transformation: A Meta-Ethnography

In a 2016 special issue on the relationships between ethnography of education and social, economic, and material precarity, Geoff Bright and John Smyth were critical of ethnographic researchers, for concentrating on discourses and discourse production only, rather than on material conditions to develop activism and processes of transformation against oppression. Instead of only identifying and critiquing precarity, and deconstructing taken-for-granted ideas to give voice to ingrained forms of oppression and marginalization, critical ethnography they wrote, should really be about changing, not only describing and analyzing, oppressive conditions. In the present article, we attempt to identify and explore cases where researchers have overcome the reluctance toward activism and transformation. Using empirical examples we will try to illustrate what characterized these efforts and what seemed to support their success.