The potential of affective ethnography in educational research

Abstract

In this paper, I present an approach of affective ethnography based on the work of Ahmed (2004), Wacquant (2014), Barad (2007) and Gheradi (2019) and explain its relevance for ethnographic educational research. Vulnerability is reproduced during ethnographic research, where it arises unexpectedly. Following my affective ethnography approach, I reflect from a relational perspective on who is emotionally affected by such research and how their various positions and vulnerabilities are transformed. Affective ethnography enables an ethical practice that acknowledges positionings which do not represent a uniquely‘correct’ truth but instead show the positionalities of the researchers in relation to members of the field. In this paper, I argue why certain perspectives should be co-represented in an ‘affective montage’ (Stodulka, Dinkelaker, and Thajib 2020) so as to convey pedagogical practice in its multiplicity and vulnerability to the reader or listener (cf. Gherardi 2019, 752).