Ethnography has come under a lot of quite justified attack of late from a variety of different sources. This led in the 1980’s to the crisis in anthropology; a discipline hewn out of the ethnographic technique of studying the ‘other’ and to significant debates within feminist research (especially in Australia and the US). It has also led to a marked decline and reticence to undertake ethnography, which even in its uncritical heyday was not the easiest of activities. Yet it is precisely these difficulties that has made ethnography one of the most rigorous and important methodologies. It is the impossibility of not being able to avoid the accusations of exploitation, colonial reproduction and the quagmire of representation and ethics that makes for a reflexive and vigilant researcher. It is for these reasons that I now make an argument for using ethnography for educational research, detailing throughout the costs and benefits involved. I begin with some scene setting, which investigates the epistemological underpinnings to ethnography, mining a pit-hole that needs to be avoided. I then explore how ethnographers use theory to show how the deployment of certain concepts can lead to a move from representations of powerless object to agentic subject. Then, using examples from two different research projects” one an ethnographic study of white working-class women in a further education college taking ‘caring courses’ sometimes known as parenting classes, some of which is published in Formations of Class and Gender and the other new project of Violence, Sexuality and Space (conducted with Karen Corteen, Les Moran, Carole Truman, Lindsay Turner, Paul Tyrer), I will show how temporalities and contradiction are best understood through rigorous and reflexive ethnography.

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