Chapter 8 Envisioning undocumented historias: Evoking a critical performance ethnography

Abstract

In a politically charged research environment in which the US National Research Council's (NRC) Committee on Scientific Research in Education promotes legislation that defines legitimate research as “scientific” in increasingly limited and normative ways, the academy is seemingly witnessing calls for a diminution of research approaches (Kezar & Talburt, 2004). In our explication of critical performance ethnography we call not for retraction but methodological renewal (Law & Urry, 2004) and research approaches able to engage with and (re)present the sensory, emotional, and kinesthetic realities of social and cultural phenomena in the twenty-first century. As Law and Urry (2004) observe:Social science has yet to develop its own suite of methods for understanding – and helping to enact – twenty-first century realities…methods have difficulty dealing with the sensory – that which is subject to vision, sound, taste, smell; with the emotional – time-space compressed outbursts of anger, pain, rage, pleasure, desire, or the spiritual; and the kinaesthetic – the pleasures and pains which follow the movement and displacement of people, objects, information and ideas.(Law & Urry, 2004, pp. 403–404)

Citation

Bagley, C. and Castro-Salazar, R. (2010), "Chapter 8 Envisioning undocumented historias: Evoking a critical performance ethnography", Hillyard, S. (Ed.) New Frontiers in Ethnography (Studies in Qualitative Methodology, Vol. 11), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 141-159. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1042-3192(2010)0000011011