A balancing act

Abstract

Drawing from the fieldwork experiences of four researchers, this chapter focuses on the becoming of network ethnography (NE). Premised on an understanding of networks as the predominant social and organisational structure of educational policy governance, NE affords opportunities to researchers to follow policies and policy stories as they unfold in the field. Researchers are able to gather data through extensive Internet searches, interviews and fieldwork observations. Yet as the changing policy context requires new research sensibilities and methodological repertoires, network ethnographers are likely to face new ethical and methodological challenges. This chapter explicitly asks what opportunities and challenges policy scholars face when conducting NE, particularly in terms of access to, relations with and reporting on education policy networks. This chapter contributes to the aim of the book by highlighting the invisible and messy processes of NE while sharing our collective vulnerabilities in doing research. In this chapter we argue that becoming a network ethnographer requires a balancing act between the conventions of research method and the realities of fieldwork, entangled amidst the ‘affect’ of varied sociopolitical environments of data collection.