Race, Ethnography and Education

This book focuses on race and ethnography, and in particular, it addresses two significant issues. Firstly, leading thinkers and emerging scholars in the field explicate the complicated nature of race intersections, theories, and meanings in educational ethnography. The ethnographic accounts consider schooling, which is then extended to larger educational settings, bound by unique and peculiar histories and locations. By amalgamating this selection of papers into one issue, the book both challenges the effects of educational histories, policies and practices, by interrogating theories and meanings of race, and positions race and racism in ethnography with the hope of presenting new applications and developments in ethnographic methodologies, theories, and practices.

The volume then develops the conversation by helping to build scholarship in understanding race meanings, intersections and theories in educational and social sciences. With the escalating attention given to the study of race scholarship in recent years, there is still considerable information that scholars in the field need to know about how ethnographers and ethnography, from diverse comparative and international schools and educational settings, respond to racialized and racist practices, while challenging and developing theories about race and racism in diverse global terrains and locations.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnography and Education.

Rodney K. Hopson is Professor at the Department of Educational Foundations and Leadership in the School of Education, and teaching faculty member in the Center for Interpretive and Qualitative Research, in the School of Liberal Arts, at Duquesne University, USA. Hopson’s scholarly work raises questions that analyze and address the differential impact of education and schooling on marginalized and underrepresented groups.

Adrienne D. Dixson is an Associate Professor of Critical Race Theory and Education in the Department of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. Dixson’s scholarship examines the intersectionality of race, class and gender in urban educational contexts, with a particular interest in how these issues impact educational equity for students and people of color in the urban south.