I draw on ethnographic data from a German school to explore discursive practices of educators that rationalize the illiteracy of 10-year-old, multilingual Ada. I juxtapose various moments of school life that "thickened" Ada's learner identities and find that special needs labeling often rested on pragmatic considerations of resource…

Continuing to negate deficit framings of youth sexuality and amplify youth voices, this critical queer ethnography understands California high school students' experiences with comprehensive school-based sex education. Findings make visible the detailed account of youth voices in the space of sexual health education, highlighting their agency,…

In this article, we provide an overview of diffraction theory, followed by an explanation of diffraction as an analytical methodology. We highlight how tools like the agential cut can be used to redraw the boundaries of ethnographic research so that data can be a continuous becoming with the researcher. We offer vignettes from our work on…

This paper examines the ways Indigenous Mexican educators navigate paradoxical institutional and community discourses around Indigenous language and cultural reclamation as negotiated forms of survivance and decolonial thinking in and around schools. Using ethnographic and Indigenous methodologies, we focus on the experiences of elementary…

This article features in-depth interviews and ethnographic vignettes that explore collectivism, social cohesion, and Black educational leadership as a strategy to infuse liberatory practices in the educational process. The article examines how the social foundation of African-centered ethos of collectivism can shift how marginalized students…

Aspirations have gained significant attention within educational anthropology and yet the effects (and affects) of the imperative to aspire that undergird educational projects have been underexamined. This paper argues that aspirations within the context of material depravity often produce immaterial precarity, which I index as affective states of…

Those who compete in the Gaokao, China's College Entrance Exam, are often referred to as Gaokao zhanshi, or warriors. Based on long-term ethnographic research, this article examines how Gaokao warriors combine two types of agency that are conventionally considered contradictory: the docile cultivation of virtue and the struggle against social…

This paper is based on the ethnographic multiple case study of four refugee background youths from Burma at four different schools in a midwestern urban school district in the US. My research finds that the normalization of English constructed the focal youths' language-related identities. I also argue that through this normalization, language…

This article examines why and how teachers of refugees enact protection by engaging with local forms of harm facing their refugee students. Through portraits of two classrooms in Jordan, we describe the relationships that form between Jordanian teachers and Syrian students, and the protection practices teachers develop in response. We propose a…

This qualitative study examines educational life in a neighborhood in Mexico City, analyzing how discourses have produced the neighborhood, Tepito, as a place "without education." Simultaneously, ethnographic research entangles with theories of radical equality and resistance to explore how education emerges and how certain forms of…

This article analyzes critical reflection groups held over the course of a year-long collaborative ethnography between me as researcher and five novice bilingual teachers. Drawing on feminist theories of emotion as knowledge, I argue that coalitional critical consciousness developed in our meetings through emotional expression and acknowledgment…

In this reflection, I contextualize my own experiences conducting educational ethnography in a synchronous online kindergarten classroom during the COVID-19 pandemic. I highlight how conducting research in online classrooms transforms ethnographic research methodologies and concepts such as the field site. I offer four suggestions, derived from my…

This theoretical article explores the concept of community funds of knowledge and identity to complement the two related notions of funds of knowledge (focused on the knowledge and skills of families) and funds of identity (students' practices and lived experiences). By "community funds of knowledge and identity," we mean the…

In this article, we synthesize ethnographic data from two studies in US school districts that were implementing dual language bilingual education (DLBE) programs in order to remediate the standardized test scores of students from Spanish-speaking families. While educators in both districts commonly cited "the research" to justify DLBE…

This article centers two "zones of sovereignty" that Maya Chuj youth organizers and educators in Guatemala and the United States created from within and across nation-states and settler colonial projects. It highlights how these spaces supported Chuj young people and educators as they navigated and (re)imagined relationality and…