Evolutions in Critical and Postcritical Ethnography

Moving beyond traditional critical ethnography, postcritical ethnographies accept as a key premise that studies which are critical of the social world must also turn critique back on the ethnographer, the study, and its process. The book includes an introduction to the evolutions of critical ethnography and postcritical ethnography and exemplar chapters from contributors who engaged in long-term ethnographic studies. Accompanying each chapter is an introductory preface and margin notes created by the editors to underscore the methodological ‘moves’ made by each author.

Addressing the distinct orientations critical and postcritical ethnographies take, the book illuminates how different authors think, enact, and represent their critical and postcritical/post-critical work. In this way the book is pedagogical within and across each chapter. Each contributor has produced a chapter that includes a brief summary of their respective long-term inquiry project with emphases on relation in the being, doing, and theorizing of qualitative research. Contributors discuss their navigation of commitments across the arc of their research and engage critical social theory, interrogating issues of power and ideology. Each chapter includes retrospective analytical reflections on the long-term ethnographic work contributors completed. The chapters address interpretivist commitments to emic analyses, metaphor, and representation and each contributor’s personal and professional commitments to equity and justice. The chapters engage critical social theories, crip horizons, critical race theory, and queer theory, as well as critical and queer pedagogies, de/colonialism, and post-humanism. A summary chapter addresses key issues in contemporary postcritical/post-critical qualitative research.

The book is designed to prepare novice qualitative researchers to design, conduct, and represent postcritical/post-critical qualitative research. The book provides guidance for researchers who are interested in social critique, equity, and justice and who seek to avoid the failures in the last quarter of the 20th Century of critical ethnography.