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This chapter is based on experiences from two field studies, conducted in Tanzania and Pakistan, with a focus on women entrepreneurs. When conducting research in the global south, there are several ethical challenges to carefully consider, especially when research involves vulnerable groups of people. The aim of the chapter is to shed light on the complexities of power dynamics and to reflect on how to handle ethical dilemmas that may arise. Stories of women I met during the field work are placed at the centre and used as starting points for reflections on power dynamics. These stories lead to a discussion on whether it is legitimate for (privileged) Westerners to engage in research in the global south. The value of ethnography and auto-ethnography within entrepreneurship research is thereafter discussed in hopes of assisting future studies, where different power structures have to be considered.

During the evaluation of European Capital of Culture (ECoC) Aarhus 2017, the evaluation organisation rethinkIMPACTS 2017 formulated a set of “dilemmas” capturing the main challenges arising during the design of the ECoC evaluation. This functioned as a framework for the evaluation process. This paper aims to present and discuss the relevance of the “Evaluation Dilemmas Model” as subsequently applied to the Galway 2020 ECoC programme evaluation.

The paper takes an empirical approach including auto-ethnography and interview data to document and map the dilemmas involved in undertaking an evaluation in two different European cities. Evolved via a process of practice-based research, the article addresses the development of and the arguments for the dilemmas model and considers its potential for wider applicability in the evaluation of large-scale cultural projects.

The authors conclude that the “Evaluation Dilemmas Model” is a valuable heuristic for considering the endogenous and exogenous issues in cultural evaluation.

The model developed is useful for a wide range of cultural evaluation processes including – but not limited to – European Capitals of Culture.

What has not been addressed in the academic literature is the process of evaluating ECoCs; especially how evaluators often take part in an overall process that is not just about the evaluation but also planning and delivering a project that includes stakeholder management and the development of evaluation criteria, design and methods.

In this chapter, we share narratives from our personal experiences with a shared focus on the relationships between personal identities and family language. The acquisition of a family language is said to be accompanied by a specific ‘intercultural burden’ (Kagan 2012), which is manifested at the intersection of different influences and psychological tensions. This psychosocial and cultural reality has the potential for the development of a true intercultural identity that brings together contradictions and conflicts of inherited cultural differences. Here, through a prism of three personal narratives, we create a series of questions and reflections in relation to the family language. The three voices are articulated through three auto-ethnographic accounts of individuals – two linguists and a theatre scholar who are both personally and professionally invested in the topic of post-migration. The common thread of the three narratives is the experience of Serbian as the first language. As an aspect of personal identity, the idealised concept of family language affects one's identity and makes a decisive impact on investment and potentially life-defining decisions.

The purpose of this opinion piece is to present a case for the potential of positive autoethnography (PosAE) as a new autoethnographic approach.

This work resulted from on-going discussions between the authors as to the practicalities and benefits of associating the qualitative approach of autoethnography with the field of positive psychology.

PosAE is proposed to encourage writers to actively reflect on the importance for themselves, and their readers, of including positive narrative elements, prospective visions and exploratory trajectories in their work.

This research builds on existing research that has included positive psychology in autoethnography. As positive psychology is grounded in empirical research, the authors are suggesting that PosAE is allied to pragmatic autoethnography.

PosAE offers to facilitate positive thought, affect and strategies that could improve well-being. For example, some people struggling with serious health issues, and those helping them, may find it useful for articulating conditions and envisioning, even experiencing, positive change.

With so many lives impacted by mental health issues globally, and with rapidly changing societies struggling to provide stability and purpose, an autoethnography that provides tools such as PERMA (Positive emotions, Engagement, Positive Relationships, Meaning, Accomplishments/Achievements) to communicate the positive seems timely.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first time the creation of an autoethnographic approach explicitly linked to positive psychology has been proposed.

Ethnography produces accounts; the critical reflection of accounts produces accountability. Ethnography requires accountability if meaningful conclusions and/or observations are to be made. Accountability requires ethnography if is to address lived experiences. Virno argues that the principles of “languaging” make ethnographies and accountability possible. This papers aims to describe an instance of the circularity of accountability and use this to explore Virno’s insights. Doing this helps us to see the connections between accountability and ethnography, and reflect on the nature of these interconnections.

Inspired by Paulo Virno’s philosophy, the authors assert that an ethnographer typically produces an account of a chosen “Other” in which this “Other” is held to account. But at the same time, the ethnographer needs to be held to account by the very same “Other” and by the “Other” of the (research) community. Furthermore, ethnographers are accountable to themselves. All these moments of accountability can endlessly circle, as responsibilization of the researchers by their Other(s) continues. For ethnography to function, this must be tamed as a (research) account ultimately has to be produced for an academic project to be considered complete. Drawing on Virno’s principle of the “negation of the negation” by the “katechon,” by the “katechon,” the authors propose a potentially valuable intervention that would enable ethnography – and by extension, ethnographers – to prosper.

The authors apply Virno’s philosophical reflections to propose a positive feedback cycle between ethnography and accountability. Virno’s ideation centers on two key concepts: (i) the multitude of social relatedness and (ii) the ontology of the languaging of individuation. Hereby, a positive circle of causality between ethnography and accountability can be realized, whereby the authors can respect but also break the causal circle(s) of ethnography and accountability. This might be achieved via a reflection on Virno’s concept of the “katechon.”

The authors illuminate the accountability–ethnography dynamic, providing an illustration of the circularity of ethnography and accountability and showing how Virno provides us with tools to help us deal with it. Hence, ultimately, the paper focuses on the accountability as ethnographers.

In this chapter, we present a collaborative autoethnographic study with two main layers: first, we share experiences of two separate educational research projects and explore how different dialogic research practices facilitate both participants and researchers to discover the phenomenon being studied; second, we engage in a dialogic conversation to discover our own research practices. Focussing on projects in two different countries (Norway and Canada), our initial centring question for this chapter is: how do our research practices facilitate insight into participants’ real-life experiences and practices? Then turning the light on our own research practices, we ask: what onto-epistemological assumptions shape our dialogical research practices? The chapter reveals that dialogic research practices allowed collective wisdom to be discovered and ensured that we were able to break through the taken-for-grantedness both of the concept being studied and of our own research practices.

This conceptual, multi-voiced paper aims to collectively explore and theorize family entrepreneuring, which is a research stream dedicated to investigating the emergence and becoming of entrepreneurial phenomena in business families and family firms.

Because of the novelty of this research stream, the authors asked 20 scholars in entrepreneurship and family business to reflect on topics, methods and issues that should be addressed to move this field forward.

Authors highlight key challenges and point to new research directions for understanding family entrepreneuring in relation to issues such as agency, processualism and context.

This study offers a compilation of multiple perspectives and leverage recent developments in the fields of entrepreneurship and family business to advance research on family entrepreneuring.

This theme issue sought to find answers to the question: What should be the role of tourism education social structures to create and support collaborative learning environments and the tourism sector?

A thematic analysis of the articles in this collection draws together the key outcomes related to the strategic question, with particular reference to the contribution to knowledge, important to generate ideas and conceptual researches that will support institutions teaching tourism and hospitality. Archive research results and recommendations to encourage the collaboration of different stakeholders involved in sustainable tourism development. Most importantly to raise awareness of the question of what educators are doing in tourism education for social, organizational structures in learning environments and the actual tourism sector.

Two key players, the educator and sector has been challenged to consider their roles in education as well as depicting the role of social and organizational structures that support the students, institutions and the tourism sector. The main findings have proven the important role education plays for a truly sustainable tourism model, suggesting that it is not possible to create awareness of the sustainable development goals without incorporating them in the tourism education system with the support of information computer technology.

This paper reflects on the strategic question discussed in this theme issue, and it contains valid reviews, research studies by practitioners who are experienced in the field of tourism education with an opportunity to research, reflect and develop new possibilities in learning, mitigate negative points and increase positive tourism education roles for sustainable tourism development, in the destination and industry.

This is the concluding chapter of Researching Practices Across and Within Diverse Educational Sites: Onto-epistemological Considerations. In this chapter, we recall the primary purpose of the book as to examine what it is that we believe we do as a diverse group of researchers from Australia, Finland, Norway, and Canada in educational research, reflexively considering our researching practices and how projects ‘turn out’ as a consequence of these practices. Having met and worked together as a part of the pedagogy, education, and praxis (PEP) international network, our collaborations offer us an important intercultural and cross-cultural opportunity to consider our positionality and responsibilities as researchers to our participants and co-inquirers, and their communities. Sharing our projects reveals the affordances and challenges offered by various methodologies unique from and common across our projects but also reinforces the imperatives of relationality, respect, and reciprocity between researchers and the communities they serve. We leave the readers with a concept that builds upon the title of this book, that of axio-onto-epistemology, already in use in postcolonial and decolonial/Indigenous scholarship, but raised here as an open invitation for all educational researchers to consider in their researching praxis.