Ethnographies across virtual and physical spaces: a reflexive commentary on a live Canadian/UK ethnography of distributed medical education

Abstract

This article draws on an ongoing ethnography of distributed medical education (DME) provision in Canada in order to explore the methodological choices of the researchers as well as the wider pluralisation of ethnographic frameworks that is reflected within current research literature. The article begins with a consideration of the technologically mediated ways in which the researchers do their work, a way of work that is paralleled within the DME curriculum that forms the focus of the ethnography. The article goes on to problematise relationships amongst the researchers and between the researchers and the field of research, and to consider the ways in which methodological choices are mediated. In so doing, the article proposes an acceptance of methodological pluralism that is tempered by the need to acknowledge the sometimes-slight differences that distinguish ethnographic paradigms.