Submitted Abstract
The conference in Luxembourg 2013 is the continuation of a series of international conferences on present tendencies of ethnographic research in Education. In line with the mission of the previous conferences in Zurich (2006), Frankfurt (2009) and Erlangen (2011), it aims at exploring and discussing present developments in Educational Ethnography with respect to their specific empirical and theoretical contribution to Educational Science and its understanding of pedagogical phenomena. Starting in 2006 as an event for the German-speaking community of ethnographers in Educational Science, these conferences – each of them financially supported by leading national research funding agencies like the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) or the Swiss National Science Foundation (Schweizerischer National Fonds, SNF) – helped to establish a dynamic discourse for the vital community of ethnographic researchers in Educational Science in the German speaking countries and across Europe by linking current developments of the research field with central and basic theoretical and knowledge political questions in Educational Science. The 2013 conference in Luxembourg, which will be held bilingually in German and English, will mark a new milestone in this development as it strengthens the international orientation of this series by addressing a broader international audience and by bringing together the German speaking ethnographic community with leading scientists and young researchers from all over the world.With its title ”MultiPluriTrans. Emerging Fields in Educational Ethnography“, the Luxembourgian conference picks up ongoing developments in ethnographic research which deal with the translocality and plurality of educational realities, with the multilingual, multicultural and multimodal conditions of pedagogical practice, and with the complex relations between local practice and national/global transformations and policies. The contributions shall discuss theoretical and methodological conceptualizations, empirical research findings, as well as questions of research practice and methods. By doing so, the conference raises the question in which way ethnographic research contributes to transforming a traditional understanding of educational reality as a unity of time, space, person and action into more dynamic, scattered and intervowen conceptualizations of pedagogical phenomena. It asks for the potentials and ambiguities multi-, pluri- and transanalytical ethnographic research strategies and discoveries have for theoretical assumptions about the constitution of the objects of educational scientific research. With a 3-days programme, 6 keynotes and more than 60 papers, research workshops and posters submitted by ethnographers from all over Europe and the US and up to 140 participants expected to register, the Luxembourg conference is going to represent the ongoing process of establishing Educational Ethnography as a main area of theoretically driven and empirically informed research in Educational Science.