Critical Ethnography Research Articles

"Nobody Knew . . . What Was Gonna Happen": Indigenous Loss and Grief During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Indigenous peoples have experienced higher rates of loss and death compared to the general population, partly due to historical loss. This qualitative inquiry focused on understanding Indigenous women's experiences of loss, grief, and death during the COVID-19 pandemic, involving 31 head-of-household Native American women from a southeastern US tribe. Reconstructive analysis of data from a community-based critical ethnography identified the following themes spanning the ecological levels of the FHORT: (a) loss of finances, (b) loss of structure and loss of self, (c) death due to COVID-19, (d) disrupted mourning and burial rituals, and (e) grief and extensive losses. Results indicate that the pandemic not only exacerbated historical loss, but interventions and models for working through grief and loss should not only be culturally tailored and promote healing across all ecological domains and include physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual aspects, but should also address historical trauma, collectivist values, and traditional ways.

Theatre of the oppressed for empowerment and research

ABSTRACT Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) was not invented as a research method but is increasingly attracting researchers’ attention as a unique approach to describing and understanding the situations faced by underprivileged groups. Despite these positive features and this increasing attention, there are some aspects which should be carefully described and negotiated if we are to also use the TO for research purposes. Firstly, we delineate TO vis-à-vis participatory action research (PAR) and critical ethnography and describe our experience of using TO both at the university level and in researching marginalised groups. Subsequently, we outline the strategies for choosing non-actors to participate which affect the researcher’s control over the agenda and the data discovered. We also discuss how research questions are developed in TO by the researcher and the participants. We then distinguish three approaches to inviting audiences. The arguments are based on 10 years of experience using the TO for intervention and research, contributing to reflection on the TO as a comprehensive method of empowerment and research.

Cafecitos as a Conduit for Latinx Family Engagement Through Community Cultural Wealth

This critical ethnography presents findings from a two-year-long study of Latinx family engagement using cafecitos in a dual-language elementary school. Using ethnographic approaches to data collection and analysis, the researchers analyzed how to implement cafecito monthly meetings with parents that focused on engagement approaches and arts integration surrounding a community cultural wealth model. Findings revealed a correlation between positive family and student identity development because of the integration of community members as experts within the cafecitos. We share recommendations for using cafecitos as a tool for parental engagement to create a more inclusive, supportive, and culturally responsive environment that benefits students and their families.

“You can't ignore us”: Multiliteracies and disruption in youth activism

AbstractThis article examines the activism of student protesters in a rural Rust Belt community's Black Lives Matter protest, challenging prevailing stereotypes about civic engagement, literacies, and youth involvement in rural settings. Utilizing critical ethnography and nexus analysis to examine disruptions of discourses in place and interview student participants about their activism, findings showcase how students strategically practiced multiliteracies to upturn power dynamics and assume leadership roles within a socio‐spatial landscape. Examining youth protest literacies can inform education partners of the ways students already engage in civic discourse and how understanding their co‐construction of space can inform practices across learning communities.

How “helping” can sustain the stigmatization of homeless people

Summary The article presents findings of an ethnographic study carried out in Poland with homeless people living on the street and in a hostel. Interpretative orientation was used to ensure the opportunity to gain in-depth knowledge about their perspectives. The paper has two aims. First, it reconstructs the limits and risks of “(un)helpful help” and its impact on experiences of stigma. Second, it addresses how good intentions and policy efforts can have negative consequences, drawing on data from two separate research studies. The first research included seven male homeless people living on city streets. The second was carried out with 20 homeless people served by an agency working for homeless people. A qualitative methodology was employed for this critical ethnography, according to which the authors analyzed the data using a constructivist grounded theory approach. Findings The research revealed a number of support measures which, instead of positively changing their situation from the participants’ points of view, can exacerbate it by further stigmatizing homeless people with support based on helpers’ stigmatizing approaches which can compound homeless people's negative experiences of “help.” Applications An understanding of the mechanisms of structural and systemic stigmatization from the participants’ perspectives can help shift responsibility for their situation away from homeless people themselves toward society's responsibility as a whole. It highlights how there needs to be a change of consciousness and approaches within assistance systems, shifting the balance from an asymmetrical to a symmetrical relationship based on partnership and collaboration.

Knowledge on fire: the impact of conflict and violence on education in Afghanistan

ABSTRACT This article examines the impact of armed conflict on the education system in Afghanistan between 2001–2021. Using critical ethnography as its main research approach, the article draws on the perceptions and experiences of varying educational stakeholders (n = 103) to identify different forms of setbacks, which the wider educational community endured at the intersection of international intervention and an armed conflict. The article builds critical insights into the dynamic and simultaneous processes of interactions and relationships between armed conflict and education and the mechanisms that facilitated their sustenance, and its implications for education. The article illustrates how the education system in Afghanistan was implicated by persistent violence under the disguise of recovery interventions and implicated educational stakeholders’ agency that is crucial for enabling educational transformations amid violence and fragility.

Tri Lulu: Community Resistance to Source-Based Waste Management Policies in Badung Regency Bali

Bali encounters a waste emergency due to the amplification in the type and volume of the population’s waste. The Bali government has initiated community resistance, particularly in Badung Regency, Bali. This study aims to critically reflect on this circumstance from the lens of the qualitative method using a cultural studies approach. Field research was performed by implementing the critical ethnography model. The study reveals that community resistance is categorized into three waste management dimensions called Tri Lulu, i.e., individual and public resistance, hyperregulation conflict, and disruption of local concepts. Individual and public resistance, both open and covert, reflects the failure of dialogue between subjective awareness and regulative practice in finding practical solutions. Hyperregulation in waste management causes policies to overlap and triggers conflicts of interest. Local concepts are disrupted due to increasing pressure on demographic and economic infrastructure. Pentahelix synergy is required to implement waste management policies in Bali.

What matters for sustainable psychosocial interventions and who decides? Critical ethnography of a lay counselling program in Nepal

Lay counselling, or the delivery of talk-based therapeutic support by people without a clinical degree, is gaining popularity as a way of addressing global shortages of mental health professionals. In Nepal, lay counselors have made significant contributions to mental health and psychosocial care over the last two decades, particularly in the aftermath of major emergencies. However, research on the longer-term integration and sustainability of lay counselling interventions remains limited. This ethnographic study explored the meaning and importance of sustainability to different stakeholders in a lay counselling program implemented following Nepal’s 2015 earthquake. We conducted participant observation in the everyday lives of five counsellors as well as four focus group discussions and 51 semi-structured interviews with counsellors and other key stakeholders. Our analysis revealed significant discrepancies in perceptions of sustainability; while organizations involved in implementing the program described it as a sustainability success due to continued government financing, counsellors emphasized their own and the government’s failure to sustain high-quality service delivery in practice. Program-level barriers included inadequate budget and remuneration, lack of clinical supervision, and poor integration within existing systems. We also identified wider sociopolitical influences on sustainability, including the social positioning of counsellors, low understanding and acceptability of counselling, and a rapidly changing political landscape. These findings reveal the need for a critical approach to sustainability in global mental health, warning against superficial engagement that prioritizes continuity of government financing over quality of care and workers’ rights. Advocating for an ecological orientation within sustainability research, we also discuss the importance of looking beyond program design factors to consider how local and national sociopolitical dynamics influence frontline service provision.

Late-Life Homelessness: A Definition to Spark Action and Change.

Comprehensive definitions of social issues and populations can set the stage for the development of responsive policies and practices. Yet despite the rise of late-life homelessness, the phenomenon remains narrowly understood and ill-defined. This article and the definition that ensued are based on the reconceptualization of interview data derived from a critical ethnography conducted in Montreal, Canada, with older homeless persons (N = 40) and service providers (N = 20). Our analysis suggests that definitions of late-life homelessness must include 4 intersecting components: (1) age, eligibility, and access to services; (2) disadvantage over the life course and across time; (3) social and spatial processes of exclusion that necessitate aging in "undesirable" places; and (4) unmet needs that result from policy inaction and nonresponse. The new definition derived from these structural and relational components captures how the service gaps and complex needs identified in earlier works are shaped by delivery systems and practices whose effect is compounded over time. It provides an empirically grounded and conceptually solid foundation for the development of better responses to address homelessness in late life.

Exploring How to Construct Buddhist Temples in Sacred Forests: A Critical Ethnography in Northeast Thailand

Exploring How to Construct Buddhist Temples in Sacred Forests: A Critical Ethnography in Northeast Thailand

Told and untold stories: Finding new ways to represent the voices of culturally diverse learners through narrative vignettes

This article considers the challenges of representing young, ethnically diverse learners via narrative vignettes. Aware of young learners’ underrepresentation in research reporting compared to adult teaching perspectives, we feel it important to review methodologies that claim to represent young learners’ stories. Looking back at a year-long critical ethnography, we return to the data, reflecting on old conversations while revisiting the motivations behind writing narrative vignettes. Our new conversations consider how this brought participants (and researchers) in from the ‘margins’ of research. We reflect through an embodied, emotional and affective lens, raising important questions around the ethics of representation and making socially just choices. We conclude that narrative vignettes are not giving voice to young learners, but that the methodology captures both told and untold stories which benefit from a reflexive approach to data at the time of the research as well as retrospectively.

Sexual Health Implications of Return Migration for Women and Their Partners in Rural Mexico: A Critical Ethnography.

The return of a migrant partner can negatively impact the sexual health of women who stayed in their communities. Understanding their sexual health needs is crucial for developing targeted interventions and support systems. Our study used a critical ethnographic approach in Agua Dulce, a rural community in Mexico, involving 50 key informants: women who stayed behind (n = 20), returnees (n = 12), community leaders (n = 12), and health care professionals (n = 6). We used participant observation, policy analysis, and interviews, using purposeful and snowball sampling methods. A gender-based thematic analysis revealed economic hardships and early separations affect the sexual well-being of women who stay behind. Infidelity, discovered through social media or calls, causes emotional distress and family disruptions. Male migrants spend an average of 8.85 years abroad, leading to fears of risky sexual behaviors. Our study highlights the urgent need for specialized support centers and comprehensive health interventions.

Lifestyles associated with malaria in pregnancy in northwest Colombia: a mixed study from Latin American critical epidemiology

BackgroundIn the scientific literature on Malaria in Pregnancy (MiP), no studies have been conducted on lifestyles based on critical theory. The objective of this study was to analyse the lifestyles or singular processes of social determination of health in MiP in northwestern Colombia.MethodsMixed QUAN-QUAL convergent triangulation study. In the quantitative component, a psychometric evaluation and a cross-sectional design were conducted in 400 pregnant women to whom the Pender-Walker lifestyle scale and a survey on MiP prevention were applied. In the qualitative study, a critical ethnography was conducted with 46 pregnant women in whom their narratives and practices regarding lifestyles at home and healthcare were described.ResultsThe frequency of MiP was 9%, and a higher occurrence of the disease was identified in those who did not control stagnant water (29%), did not use insecticide-treated net (16%) and went to the hospital (14%) or the microscopist (20%) when they had fever. This coincides with the presence of unhealthy lifestyles, little knowledge about malaria, and a low perception of the risk of getting sick, as well as meanings and experiences about MiP, maternity, and pregnancy that show a high clinical, cultural, and socioeconomic burden for the women studied.ConclusionThis epidemiological profile and the approach to lifestyles based on the postulates of critical theory in health evidence that pregnant women exposed to malaria suffer serious social, cultural and health injustices that are not possible to impact with the current health model of malaria control in Colombia guided by aetiopathogenic, biomedical, positivist and utilitarian theories.

Impaired health in working children: a critical ethnography

Child labor is one of the important social issues that deprive children of many fundamental rights, and make them face many problems and consequences, including health problems. Thus, this study was conducted with the aim of examining the health of working children in Tehran. This is an ethnographic study that was conducted using Carspecken’s approach and was completed in 2022. The main participants of this study included working children aged 10–18 years living in Tehran. In order to collect information, the researcher was present at the workplace, school, and living places of working children for more than two years, observing their lives and activities. Formal and informal interviews were also conducted with the working children and informed people. In total, hundreds of working children were assessed and observed in this research. A friendly conversation was formed between the researcher and more than 50 children, and official interviews were conducted with six of the working children. Also, more than 10 official interviews were conducted with informed people and parents of working children. In addition to observations and interviews, documents such as medical records and drawings of working children were also examined and interpreted. The information obtained from observations, interviews, and documents was entered into MAXQDA software, and its raw codes were extracted. The high-level codes as well as sub and main categories were formed from the aggregation of low-level codes. Impaired health was formed from three subcategories of tormented body (work and environmental trauma, sexual abuse, malnutrition, fatigue, sleep disorder and inadequate hygiene), disquieted mind (anxious children, depression and isolation, reduced self-esteem and unfocused mind) and disrupted sociability (negative social role modeling, aggression and violence, stubbornness and vindictiveness, harassment and nuisance, reprehensible social behaviors, neglecting others’ ownership, disturbed relationships and out-group self-censorship). The results of the present study showed that the health of working children is compromised in various physical, psychological, and social ways. Therefore, some measures should be taken at the national and international levels to improve their health, such as revising the existing laws regarding children and informing children of their rights.

When backstage becomes frontstage? A critical ethnographic study of Norwegian recovery colleges

This study investigates the co-creation process between course facilitators and students while the course takes place at recovery colleges (RCs), emphasising the synergistic partnership where individuals with lived experience of mental health issues collaborate with professionals in course delivery. This paper focuses on understanding the dynamics of these interactions from the students’ perspectives and the dynamic shifts between the private realm and the public space. We conducted a qualitative study inspired by critical ethnography, collecting data from participatory observations in RCs at two locations and focus group interviews with students. Goffman’s dramaturgical approach guided us in examining social interactions in RC as theatrical performances with students playing specific roles, managing impressions, and navigating the front and backstage of their lives. During the analysis, we separated the data into front- and backstage contexts where we identified moments where students were actively performing a social role and moments revealing more authentic sides of themselves. We demonstrate that a RC is a stage where students can test their performance and adapt to their audience’s reactions. Uncertainty about their roles, social scripts, and the audience’s reactions lead them to switch between front- and backstage appearances, either performing a role or revealing their authentic sides. While exploring appearances, students develop social scripts aligning with their roles as performers and audience, eventually promoting security by mutual understanding of appropriate appearances. Emotional support, collaborative relationships, and group dynamics were critical factors in fostering an environment conducive to authentic participation. Challenges persist, such as vulnerability, recognizing the value of personal contributions, and establishing personal boundaries. Safety within the college environment was paramount for genuine engagement in co-creation, leading to personal and collective benefits for mental health services. The study suggests an in-depth investigation into the structural and power dynamics that shape such interactive processes within RCs.

Mental Health and Relational Needs of Cambodian Refugees after Four Decades of Resettlement in the United States: An Ethnographic Needs Assessment.

The United States has a long history of welcoming refugees fleeing persecution, organized violence, and war. However, the welcome often does not come with adequate immigration infrastructure support necessary to rebuild life and promote family well-being. Approximately 157,000 Cambodians were accepted to resettle in the U.S. between 1975 and 1994 due to the countrywide genocide. Upon resettlement, Cambodians were placed in impoverished neighborhoods with little resources to heal and rebuild. The purpose of this study, grounded in a Human Ecological Model and guided by Critical Ethnography principles, was to conduct a formal needs assessment of Cambodian refugee families across the United States. Eighteen professionals were interviewed virtually in Khmer and/or English. The data were analyzed using the Developmental Research Sequence. The results emphasized a critical need to address mental health complications resulting from untreated mental health disorders such as posttraumatic stress, depression, anxiety-related disorders, and complicated grief, across generations. Severe disruptions in family relationships (i.e., parent-child and couple relationships) were also reported along with substance abuse in the absence of access to culturally responsive mental health treatments. Findings suggest the need for culturally tailored multilevel interventions to effectively address mental health and relational challenges of multigenerational Cambodian families.

“Nilai-nilai Bawah Tanah:” Tinjauan Antropologis Tentang Anarkisme Dalam Paradigma Cultural Studies di Kalangan Anak Muda Kota Makassar

The anarchist punk subculture started with a spirit of resistance, but unfortunately the popular culture that absorbed this subculture has caused it to lose its resistance essence. Despite its spirit, the subculture has been integrated into the very system it previously resisted. This article focuses on the ways in which young people in Makassar City consume "underground values" and their anarchic forms of expression in adopting these values through creativity, especially in the form of music. This research uses Critical Ethnography as a cultural research approach that uses a critical paradigm, which criticizes and offers solutions to cultural injustice, marginalization, exploitation, and subordination. The Cultural Studies paradigm highlights conflicts, interests, and power in culture. The informants in this article are young people who join a group that consumes "underground values" on a daily basis. The data collection techniques used in this research are through interviews and participatory observation used in the context of qualitative research because it allows researchers to directly observe the actions, attitudes, and atmosphere that exist. The informants in this study were determined by purposive sampling with reference to the following criteria: Young people who join subcultures that consume “subteterranean value” and express them in their daily lives. The results show that political norms and culture influence individual experiences, even encouraging adaptation to expectations that may conflict with personal desires. The transformation of subcultures and "underground values" that originally focused on resistance to the dominant culture, but later integrated into the structure of the dominant culture. The influence of the dominant culture creates alienation and inequality, limiting the freedom of individuals to shape their identity. "Underground values" are a form of alternative and counterculture to the dominant culture, reflecting strong values of collectivism and anti-hierarchy. Despite the transformation, the essence of underground values continues to criticize capitalism and conventional norms in society. This subculture continues to offer a space for expression, despite the pressures and changes that occur over time.

Utilizing an Embedded Critical Ethnography Experience to Help Residents Understand Locally Relevant Social Determinants of Health.

Utilizing an Embedded Critical Ethnography Experience to Help Residents Understand Locally Relevant Social Determinants of Health.

The politics of distraction in planning English-medium education policy in schools

ABSTRACT This article presents the findings of a critical ethnography focused on the English-medium instruction (EMI) policy in Nepal’s public schools. Through the analysis of policy documents and interviews with policymakers, the study reveals that policymakers view the EMI policy as a solution to the crisis in public schools by enhancing their competitiveness with private English-medium schools. However, this approach is identified as a ‘politics of distraction’, as it diverts attention from broader issues such as implicit privatization, funding cuts, and accountability deficits for implementing multilingual education policy. By framing EMI as a public policy doctrine using discursive strategies (e.g. neoliberal rationalization and justification) and suggesting that the crisis can be resolved through school privatization, which in turn promotes commodified languages like English and the national dominant language, Nepali, over local/Indigenous languages, policymakers largely disregard inequalities, structural conditions, and reinforce the existing unequal power relations. By diverting attention from critical issues, policymakers perpetuate historical marginalization, colonial agendas and ideologies, and unequal power asymmetries, failing to address systemic challenges. The research underscores the necessity of scrutinizing the motivations and agendas underlying the promotion of EMI in mainstream schools in multilingual contexts.

Māori and Pacific student’s resistance to colonial cis-heteronormative discourse within high schools in Aotearoa, New Zealand

ABSTRACT In this article, we draw on findings from two critical ethnographic studies across three high schools in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. While the critical ethnographies canvased a range of topics, this article draws on the empirical findings specific to exploring how relationships and sexuality education as a key learning area within Health Education, continues to privilege western, cis-heteronormative understands of relationships and sexuality. Drawing on Butler’s theory of gender performativity and Foucault’s understanding of power relations we share student narratives which demonstrate the strength of cis-heteronormativity, even as teachers and students work to disrupt these norms. Furthermore, we engage queer theory and Tongan concepts such as tauhi vā to demonstrate how the inclusion of Pacific and queer knowledges allow students to subvert dominant colonial understandings of relationships and sexuality.