Toward Radical Intimate Ethnography: Challenging Research as a Violent Practice

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 1
  In Roundtable Session: Researcher-Participant Relation(ship)s

Abstract

This study introduces and argues for Radical Intimate Ethnography (RIE) as an ethnographic genre that captures the fluidity of students’ transnational lives. RIE emerged from two focal participants from a larger study with Saudi female students. RIE focuses on the importance of placing the researcher, participants, and the relationships established among each other as the epicenter of ethnography. The RIE framework draws on indigenous ways of knowing, Abu-lughod’s ethnography of the particular, and friendship ethnography. The results indicated how participants expanded friendship ethnography to an ethnography that is more intimate. RIE offers teachers, teacher educators and policymakers more intimate ways to understand students, their families, and their communities to create solutions that emerge from relationships with
students and their communities.

Author

• Youmna Deiri, Texas A&M International University