Just as complexity changes notions of what “science” is, ethnography offers an alternative model for “social science.” Particularly striking for ethnography is the family resemblance between its social research tradition and complex adaptive systems. In fact, if ethnography is seen as a CAS, several key issues appear in a new light. In this article, ethnographic research is looked at in terms o...

2 DECLARATION 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 5 LIST OF FIGURES 9 LIST OF TABLES 10 ACRONYMS 10 GLOSSARY 10 CHAPTER

This article explores my recent experience of teaching as a visiting faculty member at the Centre for Ethics at a medical University in Mangalore. My teaching and research has emerged through years as a therapist collecting stories. Stories of fact emerge through relationships and are written through experience before being presented as ‘ways of doing, writing and reading research’ From my expe...

The author discusses the application of the concepts of objectivity and subjectivity in ethnographic theory and research, and finds that one kind of subjectivity, that of applying a particular perspective to ethnography, is central and inevitable. Today, we acknowledge that objectivity is relative to a given perspective or preunderstanding, but the applied perspective must compete with other pe...

lnterpretivist movements in anthropology and sociology have recently merged with neo-Marxist and feminist theory to produce a unique genre of research in the field of education known as "critical ethnography." Critical ethnographers seek research accounts sensitive to the dialectical relationship between the social structural constraints on human actors and the relative autonomy of human agency...

Thomas David Barton provides an overview of practitioner ethnography, a research approach that provides practitioners with a way of exploring the culture of their workplace. He compares practitioner and traditional ethnography and looks at the pros and cons of the method.