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Argued is the need for: (1) a clearer interpretation of procedural ethics guidelines; (2) the identification and development of ethical field case study models which can be incorporated into university ethics teaching; (3) an understanding of the vulnerabilities of researchers and participants as reflected in the researchers' positionality and reflexivity and (4) ethnographic monitoring as a participant-friendly and participatory ethics methodology.

This article, drawn from the author's four-decade trajectory of collective ethnographic research, addresses the ethical challenges and dilemmas encountered by researchers when conducting ethnographic research, particularly with vulnerable migrant women and youth.

The author addresses dilemmas in field research resulting from different interpretations of ethics and emphasizes the need for researchers to be critically aware of their own vulnerabilities and those of migrants to avoid unethical practices in validating the context(s), language(s), culture and political landscape of their study.

The author presents case studies from the US and the Netherlands, underlining her positionality and reflexivity and revisits Dell Hymes' ethnographic monitoring approach as a participant-friendly, bottom-up methodology which enables researchers to co-construct knowledge with participants and leads to participatory ethics.

She presents case studies from the US and the Netherlands underlining her positionality and reflexivity and revisits Dell Hymes’ ethnographic monitoring approach as a participant-friendly, bottom up methodology which enables researchers to co-construct knowledge with participants and engage in participatory ethics.

Finally, she proposes guidelines for the ethical conduct of research with migrant populations that contribute to the broader methodological debates currently taking place in qualitative migration research.

Expected from this reading is the legacy that as a qualitative migration researcher one can after 4 decades of research leave behind as caveats and considerations in working with vulnerable migrants and the ethical dilemmas and challenges that need to be overcome.

The article examines situations of unease during ethnographic fieldwork with migration control agents in Sweden, Denmark and Germany. It shows how these “tests” are both methodologically challenging and analytically valuable, and how they need to be addressed properly. The article concludes a special issue on “passing the test in organisational ethnography”.

The article is based on ethnographic research with migration control agents, carried out by both authors in Denmark and Sweden (Annika) and Germany (Tobias). However, rather than presenting the main results from this research, the article focuses on the tests encountered during the research.

The article has two main findings. First, it provides an open typology of tests. Second, it proposes four ways in which ethnographers could address these tests: acknowledging them methodologically, working through them personally and collectively, unpacking them analytically and preparing others in teaching and peer-feedback.

The article encourages ethnographers to engage reflexively with fieldwork challenges, and provides a framework for doing so.

The article presents contributes to the current debate on organisational ethnography with recommendations of how to engage with tests in ethnographic fieldwork.

This study aims to reflect on the extent to which research approaches need to be deconstructed and re-imagined towards developing inclusive knowledge and non-extractive research approaches from a Global South perspective.

Conceptually, integrating the methodological logic and strategy of community-based participatory research (CBPR) and a postcolonial paradigm of decolonising research, this study proposes a research process that engages cultural diversity and an inclusive environment. CBPR approach enables involving, informing and consulting Indigenous communities in espousing theoretical approaches and giving voice to marginalised groups.

This study answers pertinent questions on what “decolonising” means and how to decolonise research by developing a model of culturally inclusive research approaches. This study ultimately posits that colonialism dominates research and limits knowledge transmission among Indigenous research ideologies.

In recent years, the world has witnessed major socio-political protests that challenges systemic racism and the role of education and institutions in perpetuating racial inequality. This study advocates that researchers consider integrating communities in the designing, conducting, gathering of data, analysing, interpreting and reporting research.

This study advocates knowledge creation through research that considers integrating the voices of Indigenous communities in the design, analysis, interpretation and reporting of research protocols.

In the light of anticolonial thought, decolonising research approaches provides a means for a radical change in research ethics protocol. A model of culturally inclusive research approach was developed, using the framework of CBPR, decolonising the research approaches comprising 6 Rs (respect, relevance, reciprocity, responsibility, relationships and relationality).

A reflexive ethnographic account of the practical and emotional challenges encountered by the researcher during fieldwork is too often separated from the analytical research results, which, as argued by this paper, downplays or even ignores the analytical value of the encountered challenges. Drawing on personal examples from ethnographic research in immigration detention, the purpose of this paper is to show that these challenges have an intrinsic analytical value.

Ethnographic research was carried out in two immigration detention centres in Belgium and one in the Netherlands. Observations, informal conversations with detainees and staff, and semi-structured interviews with detainees were triangulated. Extracts from fieldnotes are presented and discussed to demonstrate the analytical value of the challenges experienced during fieldwork.

Three important challenges are presented: distrust from organisational gatekeepers and research participants, disruptions of the organisational routines, and witnessing and experiencing feelings of powerlessness. The analytical value of these challenges is strongly connected to theoretical and analytical themes that emerged during the research.

Ethnographic researchers are encouraged to explicitly treat the reflexive accounts of practical and emotional challenges as “data in itself” and as such nested within their analytical results.

Dennis Beach is a Reader in Education Sciences (Pedagogy) who is currently employed at the Department of Education, Göteborg University. His research interests lie in the field of the sociology of education, the sociology of teachers’ work and the problems of education change. He has authored or co-authored three books and a number of articles and chapters in these subject fields and has also supervised several Ph.D. projects. At present he is head of two major national research projects in the fields mentioned, both of which are financed by the Swedish Research Council, and collaborates in two large European projects.Marie Carlson Ph.D. in sociology 2002, Göteborg University, Sweden. Her earlier studies were in social anthropology, Swedish for immigrants, and ethnicity and migration. Her main research interests are cultural studies and sociology of education. The wider project of which this chapter is a part focuses on Swedish language courses for immigrants as a social and cultural construction in the Swedish knowledge arena. It deals with questions regarding the impact of social and cultural practices on conceptions of knowledge and education. (e.g. Carlson, M., 2001) “Swedish Language Courses for Immigrants – Integration or Discrimination?” in Ethnography and Education Policy (Ed.) Geoffrey Walford, Oxford: Elsevier.) Marie Carlson also lectures on courses in ethnicity and migration, and is tutoring within the fields of “Language & culture,” “Islam” (Muslim women) and “Ethnicity.” Currently she is engaged in a project “Competing Ideas in the Renewal of SFI (Swedish for Immigrants) – An Investigation of Discursive Practices in SFI-education during Re-structuring” (financed by The Swedish Research Council). The project is carried out in corporation with Dennis Beach, Department of Education, Göteborg University.Marianne Dovemark was formerly a teacher at a comprehensive school in Sweden for over 20 years. She is in the process of completing a Ph.D. (in Educational Sciences) supervised by Dennis Beach and is currently employed as a lecturer on the pre-service Teacher Education Programme at the University College of Borås where she also does researches in the field of Sociology of Education. Her research stresses the new aims of comprehensive education in a re-structured school in Sweden with a special focus on the possibility of free choice within the school.Caroline Hudson is a Research Consultant whose company is called Real Educational Research Ltd. Caroline’s research interests encompass adult learning, literacy, family structure, offending and education, and issues related to social exclusion. Caroline is currently evaluating three literacy, language (ESOL) and numeracy developmental projects in the National Health Service (NHS), with the National Research and Development Centre (NRDC) for adult literacy and numeracy. She is also researching the impact of use of a PC tablet on the writing skills of young people who offend, for Ecotec Research and Consultancy on behalf of the Youth Justice Board (YJB). Caroline has worked as Basic Skills Advisor in the Home Office National Probation Directorate, and as an English teacher both in the United Kingdom and abroad.Bob Jeffrey has worked with Professor Peter Woods and Geoff Troman at the Open University since the early 1990s researching the effects of reform on teachers and young people in primary schools using ethnographic methods. In particular he has focused on the how the reforms have affected the creativity of teachers and more recently he has concerned himself with young people’s perspectives of their learning experiences in a project involving ten European countries. He has also contributed to the development of Ethnography in Education by publishing regular articles on methodology, editing books in this area, co-ordinating an international email list as well the Ethnography network for the European Educational Research Association and is currently co-organising the annual Oxford Conference for Ethnography in Education.Janet Donnell Johnson is a clinical lecturer and doctoral student in English Education at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, USA. A former English teacher at an alternative high school, her research interests include the interconnectedness of student identity, agency, and resistance, and literacy as a social practice in and out of classrooms. Janet is currently researching and writing a critical qualitative study based on how non-mainstream students use language to take up certain subject positions and how those positionings create opportunities for literacy learning in and out of school. In her role as clinical lecturer, she teaches writing, methods of teaching English, and coordinates partnerships between Indiana University’s English Department, Language Education Department, and teachers in the schools. She also works closely with secondary and college teachers on incorporating critical literacy and teacher research in their classrooms.Jongi “Mdumane” Klaas is currently completing a Ph.D. in Education at the University of Cambridge. The study examines the perceptions and experiences of learners and teachers vis-à-vis the processes of racial integration in two South African secondary schools. Jongi obtained a Bachelor of Pedagogics degree majoring in English Literature and History at the University of Fort Hare in South Africa. He taught History for two years at Gwaba Combined School in South Africa before taking a Fulbright Scholarship to study a Masters degree in Comparative Education at the University of Oklahoma, USA. Jongi is married to Nocwaka Sinovuyo Klaas.Jerry Lipka is a full professor at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. He has worked in cross-cultural education for the past 22 years. During this time, he has developed a long-term relationship with a group of Yup’ik Eskimo teachers and elders. This collaborative relationship has resulted in numerous publications. Most recently, this work has developed a culturally-based math curriculum; research on its effectiveness has shown that rural Yup’ik Eskimo students outperform their counterparts in math understanding.Gerry Mitchell is a Research Student at the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion and member of the Social Policy Department at the London School of Economics. She is in the final year of an ESRC funded Ph.D. researching the New Deal for Young People’s Voluntary Sector Option in London. The work is divided into three: It focuses on methodology – what is gained from applying ethnographic methods to social policy evaluations? Secondly, it analyses delivery of the New Deal at ground level and lastly explores the construction of identities around work in the narratives of young unemployed people. Recent Publications: “Choice, Volunteering and Employability: Evaluating Delivery of the New Deal for Young People’s Voluntary Sector Option” Benefits (2003), 11(2), 105–111.Farzaneh Moinian was formerly a teacher at different comprehensive schools in Iran and in Sweden. She is a doctoral student in pedagogy at Stockholm Institution of Education. Her research areas are linked to ethnography in education as well as the exploration of childhood in its historical and current manifestations. Her doctoral project includes children’s perception of morality, self-concept, values and goals as well as children’s life world from their own point of view. Her project would draw on a range of theoretical perspectives from inter-disciplinary Childhood studies, and would employ mainly qualitative methodologies, including ethnography. The various research projects carried out by Farzaneh Moinian focus on understanding the ways in which children percept and interpret their lives as well as how they communicate with other children about it.Ruth Soenen is research assistant (Fund for Scientific Research – Flanders) at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology of The Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. Her work concerns ethnographic research into everyday relationships in urban settings. Research was carried out in schools and in collective city spaces (e.g. public transport and shops) within the reflection on intercultural matters, learning, community and public domain. She wrote a book in Dutch on intercultural education, research reports for Flemish Government (Educational and City Policy) and made several contributions in leading Flemish journals and books. In English she made a contribution to “Debates and Developments in Ethnographic Methodology. Studies in Educational Ethnography Vol. 6.” Other English publications are forthcoming.Geoff Troman is a Research Fellow and Associate Lecturer in the Faculty of Education and Language Studies at the Open University. Geoff taught science for twenty years in secondary modern, comprehensive and middle schools before moving into Higher Education in 1989. Throughout his time in schools he carried out research as a teacher researcher. His Ph.D. research was an ethnography of primary school restructuring. He is currently conducting research on teachers’ work and lives and focusing on the educational policy context and primary teacher identity, commitment and career in performative cultures of schooling. Among other publications in the areas of qualitative methods, school ethnography and policy sociology, he co-authored Primary Teachers’ Stress with Peter Woods and Restructuring Schools, Reconstructing Teachers, with Peter Woods, Bob Jeffrey and Mari Boyle. Geoff is a joint co-ordinator of the Ethnography Network for the European Educational Research Association and is currently co-organising the annual Oxford Conference for Ethnography in Education.Geoffrey Walford is Professor of Education Policy and a Fellow of Green College at the University of Oxford. His books include: Life in Public Schools (Methuen, 1986), Restructuring Universities: Politics and power in the management of change (Croom Helm, 1987), Privatization and Privilege in Education (Routledge, 1990), City Technology College (Open University Press, 1991, with Henry Miller), Doing Educational Research (Routledge, editor, 1991), Choice and Equity in Education (Cassell, 1994), Doing Research about Education (Falmer (Ed.), 1998), Policy, Politics and Education – sponsored grant- maintained schools and religious diversity (Ashgate, 2000) and Doing Qualitative Educational Research (Continuum, 2001). Within the Department of Educational Studies at the University of Oxford, he is Director of Graduate Studies (Higher Degrees), has responsibility for the M.Sc. in Educational Research Methodology course, and supervises doctoral research students. He was Joint Editor of the British Journal of Educational Studies from 1999 to 2002, and has been Editor of the Oxford Review of Education from January 2004. His research foci are the relationships between central government policy and local processes of implementation, private schools, choice of schools, religiously-based schools and qualitative research methodology.Joan Parker Webster is an assistant professor at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, where she teaches courses in multicultural and cross-cultural education, children’s and young adult literature, reading theory and language acquisition, and ethnographic research methodology. She has researched and published in the areas of literacy, language acquisition, indigenous language revitalisation issues and ethnographic methodology. Parker Webster is presently working with Yup’ik Eskimo teachers and elders on a literacy-based curriculum project using traditional Yup’ik stories.Anita Wilson is a Research Associate with Lancaster Literacy Research Centre, Lancaster University, Lancaster, U.K. She has spent almost 14 years undertaking ethnographic and collaborative inquiry with people in prison. Between 2001 and 2003 she held a Spencer Post-Doctoral Fellowship from the National Academy of Education, New York which she used to introduce her theory, method and approach to prisoners in America, making a transatlantic comparison of how policy and practice impacts on prison literacies as they are “lived out” on a day to day basis. Her doctoral thesis Reading a Library – Writing a Book: The Significance of Literacies for the Prison Community proposes that people in prison live in a “third space” community, socialising the institutional in order to retain their sense of personal rather than prison identity. She maintains a strong focus on the ethics of working in constrained and sensitive settings and considers issues around exploitation, equity and advocacy to be central to ethnographic work. She has published widely and shares her work with policy-makers, practitioners and prisoners around the world. At present she is undertaking research funded by the National Research and Development Centre which investigates the importance of education to the lives of young offenders.

This article contributes the following: First, it argues along previous works that rites of passage include continuous testing, which needs to be passed in order to gain a certain level of acceptance within the research field. Here besides the emotional effort, researchers have to position themselves and are confronted with questions of trust. Second, it is argued that the collected and analysed data on the rites of passage enable us to make sense of street-level bureaucrats' work and functioning of state institutions, especially in a police context. Reflections on research negotiations drew the author's attention to how mistrust towards the “other”, here defined as migrant other, prevails the migration regime. This mistrust is later transferred onto the researcher, whose stay is deemed questionable and eventually intrusive.

The collected data include semi-structured interviews, as well as several months of participant observation with street-level officers and superordinate staff, deepening previous discussions on research access and entrance. It further allows understanding street-level narratives, especially when it comes to the culture of suspicion embedded in police work, connecting the experienced tests with the everyday knowledge of police officers and case workers.

The analysis of rites of passage enable us to make sense of street-level bureaucrats' work, especially in a police context, since we find a specific way of suspicion directed towards the researcher. It is based on a general mistrust towards the “other”, here defined as migrant other, whose stay is deemed illegal and thus intruding. In this context, the positionality of the researcher becomes crucial and needs strategical planning.

Accessing and being able to enter the “field” is of crucial relevance to researchers, interested in studying, e.g. sense-making and decision-making of the respective interlocutors. Yet, ethnographic accounts often disclose only partially, which hurdles, limiting or contesting their aspirations to conduct fieldwork, were encountered.

The personal role of researchers, their background and emotions are often neglected when describing ethnographic research. Struggles and what these can say about the studied field are thus left behind, although they contribute to a richer understanding of the functioning of the chosen fields. This work will examine how passing the test and going through rituals of “becoming a member” can tell us more about the functioning of a government agency, here a Swedish border police unit.

The purpose of this commentary is to share preliminary findings from our ethnographic research on refugee women's livelihoods during the COVID-19 pandemic in Portland, Oregon (USA), and to highlight the significance of community efforts in providing gender-responsive measures that address the specific needs and challenges of refugee women.

This commentary draws on a mixed-method approach, including ethnographic research (interviews and observations) as well as an analysis of emerging research on the social implications of COVID-19 in the fields of migration and gender.

Refugee women's livelihoods have been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic in various specific ways: from losing jobs and healthcare to becoming essential workers and assuming additional caretaker roles, to finding oneself again in unprecedented situations of limited mobility and social isolation. These impacts have been informed by restricted access to resources and services, lack of information about resources and services, and paramount fear due to ever-changing policy. Based on interviews and observations the authors conducted, they find that in many ways, community efforts have addressed the specific needs and challenges of refugee women in the absence of gender-responsive COVID-19 measures across institutional levels and policy areas.

In this commentary, the authors present original data from their ethnographic research on a particularly marginalized, yet resilient population: refugee women. By centering refugee women's experiences, the authors highlight the lack of gender-responsiveness in COVID-19 measures and provide insights into social implications of COVID-19 that often remain overlooked and understudied in discourse and politics.

As migration of family members becomes an omnipresent phenomenon, the conventional norm of having a family and living under the same roof together is far from normal for many households. It produces transnational practices and multisite lifestyle configurations. This study aims to explore the implication of maternal absence as a result of transnational labour migration on the left-behind child in the context of transnational labour migration from Ethiopia.

It focusses on the perspective of those who stayed behind. The ethnographic fieldwork was carried out in two rural villages – Bulebullo and Bokekesa – of Worebabbo district in Northern Ethiopia. It involved in-depth interviews with children and their caregivers supported by interviews and group discussions with members of the community, local officials and traditional leaders.

Transnational mothering and other mothering emerge as new practices of mothering in the rural villages due to maternal absence have interrelated implications and meanings for the left-behind child. However, the rigidity of sending societies’ norms related to mothering and gendered labour dynamics exacerbated the negative implications of maternal absence on left-behind children. The absence of the fathers’ effort to redefine mothering or fathering by providing childcare is part of the equation in the relationship between maternal absence and left-behind children.

The findings of this study refute the notion that labels mother’s out-migration as “abandoning children”, “disrupting families” and “acts of selfishness”.

The purpose of this paper is to benchmark national culture in the context of decent work practices in project-based industry of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). This should help in achieving successful short-term migration. The study also aims to validate the decent work practice indicators for Bangladeshi, Chinese, Indian and Pakistani construction labourers working in the UAE.

This study takes an ethnographic approach in its qualitative research methodology. The research involves observational methodology for its data collection during the execution of construction projects, semi-structured interviews to confirm the data collection during observational approach and a narrative methodology for the data collection within the labour camps, grassy fields and town streets. The qualitative data were expressed in quantitative terms to signify statistically the effect of the national culture in the context of decent work practices in this industry. Hence, the research involved triangulation in its data collection and analysis.

The study reveals that the national cultures of the migrant construction labourers in this context are not the same as identified by Geert Hofstede about four decades earlier. It was found that Indians were high in uncertainty avoidance, Pakistani construction labourers were high in masculinity, Bangladeshi construction labourers were low in long-term orientation (LTO) and individualism and Chinese labourers were found to have high individualism and LTO. This study verified decent work practice indicators for Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi construction labourers and identified different decent work practice indicators for Chinese construction labourers in the UAE than Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi construction labourers.

The study was limited to the construction labourers in the UAE. The data were collected during observation while execution construction projects and limited to visiting construction labour camps, grassy fields and town streets.

The differences in the national culture of the migrant construction labourers and the decent construction practices in the UAE have economic, social and environmental implications for construction labourers in the Arab world, for both migrant sending and receiving countries. Understanding and managing various national cultures and improving prevalent decent work practices would help to improve economic and social condition of the migrant construction labourers and help to arrest the advance of looming health problems.

The study identifies the national cultures of the migrant construction labourers in the context of decent work practices in the UAE. Improvement in the decent work practices of the migrant sending countries and the UAE and understanding of the culture of the migrants will help in preparing effective migration policy by both migrant sending and receiving countries. No study was found to have identified national cultures in the context of decent work practices and assessed the need for improvement in this regard.

The term “parenting” has come to assume a specific sociological meaning: it defines parents’ role and agency not only with regard to their children, but also to the state, medical doctors, psychologists and educators. How normative stances toward parenting affect the lives of parents has started to be analyzed in the social sciences, however less is known about how the “culture of parenting” impacts on the way migrant families take care of their children. The purpose of this paper is to untangle the conceptual and disciplinary roots of parenting studies stemming from early anthropological studies of kinship and ethno-psychological theories, through to the anthropology of childhood and child rearing and the current socio-anthropological studies of parenting. This review offers conceptual tools for the creation of a critical perspective on migration and parenting.

The paper acknowledges the theoretical and empirical gap in the study of migration and parenting by illustrating the sparse and interdisciplinary literature which has dealt with migration and parenting.

The paper discusses the presented literature’s limits and potentialities in light of the new culture of parenting.

The paper addresses future paths for ethnographic work.