1

ETHNOGRAPHIC SPACES
OF POSSIBILITIES
Interactional Ethnography in Focus

Audra Skukauskaitė and Judith L. Green

This volume introduces readers new to ethnographic research to the logic

and practice of Interactional Ethnography (IE), a discourse-based ethnographic
approach which emphasizes in time and over time engagement and learn-
ing with and from the people in dynamic social and cultural settings. As you
will see when reading this book as a whole, IE offers an interdisciplinary
approach to uncovering and systematically representing intricate complexi-
ties of everyday life co-constructed in and through moment-by-moment and
over time interactions of people in educational and other social spaces. While
the roots of IE can be traced back to the 1970s to networks of interdiscipli-
nary scholars exploring educational opportunities and constraints on diverse
students in educational settings (cf., Cazden et al., 1972), by the 1990s, IE,
as a discourse-based ethnographic epistemology, was taken up across fields
and national and international settings. However, to date, there has been no
single book to introduce the guiding principles and epistemological processes
of IE.
By bringing together an international and intergenerational network of
contributors who have engaged with IE research across sites and fields of study,
we address the need for a single volume that introduces the theoretical and
epistemological processes of IE. As the chapters in this volume will show,
IE, as a discourse-focused video-enabled approach to ethnography, supports
researchers in exploring complex social and discourse processes and practices
being constructed by participants in educational spaces in and across levels of
schooling and other social spaces.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003215479-1

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 2 A. Skukauskaitė and J.L. Green

A Brief Overview of the Volume and Its Goals

In the remaining sections of this introductory chapter, we lay a foundation for
readers to gain insights into conceptual perspectives guiding IE and related
studies in ethnographic spaces of possibilities (Agar, 2006). We introduce
underlying iterative, recursive, and abductive (IRA) logic of ethnographic
inquiry, which is represented in varied ways in the work of chapter authors.
We also provide a brief overview of IE and its guiding principles. Then, draw-
ing on Mitchell’s arguments about different kinds of cases in ethnographic
research, we position the chapters as telling cases which make visible the theo-
retical and analytic ethnographic logic of inquiry and its potentials. In the last
section of the introduction, we present the organization of the volume and a
brief overview of the chapters.
The volume can be viewed as an invitation to what Anthropologist
Michael Agar (2006) calls ethnographic spaces. Within these spaces of inter-
related ethnographic possibilities, we emphasize how the researchers engage
in discourse-based IE and the ethnographic logic of inquiry for studying and repre-
senting the work of the people in culturally responsive, grounded, empirical,
and transparent ways. In this way, we view this network of IE scholars as
laying a foundation for all of us, authors and readers, to continue a process
of envisioning new ethnographic possibilities for understanding and studying
complex, socially and discursively co-constructed everyday worlds of particu-
lar social groups.

Ethnography as a Space of Possibilities Through an

Iterative, Recursive, and Abductive Logic of Inquiry
Anthropologist Michael Agar (2006), who has worked across disciplines in
academia and as an independent researcher and whose ideas are reflected
in many chapters in this book, has argued that there is no one kind of eth-
nography. Instead, there are many “spaces of possibilities” for ethnographic
work and study of cultural processes and practices. These spaces are inter-
connected through an ethnographic logic and underlying commitments to under-
stand in depth the complexity of everyday social life, including language use and
actions, within and across particular groups, times, and spaces (Anderson-
Levitt & Rockwell, 2017; Atkinson, 2017; Eisenhart, 2017; Heath & Street,
2008).
Agar and other ethnographers have (re)conceptualized ethnography not as
a method, but as a way of

thinking (Atkinson, 2017),

seeing (Frank, 1999; McCarty, 2014; Wolcott, 2008),
learning (Agar, 1996; Heath & Street, 2008; Walford, 2008),

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 Ethnographic Spaces of Possibilities 3

knowing (Green et al., 2012),

being and becoming (Sancho-Gil & Hernández- Hernández, 2021;
Skukauskait ė, 2021), and
interacting with the peoples and worlds in complex, nonlinear, and eth-
ical ways.

In other words, ethnography is a philosophy of research (Anderson-Levitt,

2006), an epistemology (Green et al., 2012), and a logic of inquiry (Agar, 2006;
Green, Baker et al., 2020). The perspectives on ethnography as epistemology
guide the ways in which authors in this volume conceptualize phenomena we
study, shape how we study and construct knowledge, how we interact and
relate with sites and people studied, and how we write, represent, and translate
(Agar, 2006) what we learn to new audiences.
Ethnography is guided not by particular methods or theories, but by the
logic of inquiry and ways of thinking and doing through which we create the
ethnographic spaces and multifaceted research projects (Atkinson, 2017; Green
et al., 2015). The ethnographic logic is abductive, iterative, and recursive (Agar,
2006). As demonstrated across chapters in this volume, the ethnographic IRA
logic enables ethnographers to engage in multiple levels of analyses and to generate
new concepts and understandings of the social and discursive co-construction of
everyday life at multiple levels of scale and in relation to varied contexts, actions,
and interactions within and across groups. Agar wrote,

… more and more as time goes on, I think of ethnography as a kind

of logic rather than any specific method or any particular unit of study.
Ethnography names an epistemology – a way of knowing and a kind of
knowledge that results – rather than a recipe or a particular focus.
(par.57)

This ethnographic space engages researchers in an abductive logic for

seeking and discovering new ideas, iterative processes that foster continuous
exploration and change stemming from but transcending previous under-
standings, and recursive actions that enable the ethnographer to reach back to
earlier points after exploring new pathways. Iterative, recursive, and abduc-
tive (IRA as Agar refers to it) logic is what allows ethnographers to study
people’s everyday activity in particular social sites in depth, from multiple
perspectives, leading to new concepts and theories. The ethnographic logic is
analytic, not merely descriptive, and fosters new ways of seeing, studying, under-
standing, and (re)presenting the social worlds studied. Agar sees logic, rather
than methods or any particular parameters bounding a study, as a way to
explore ethnographic spaces. Our volume also emphasizes the logic and
transparent analytic representations of ethnographic inquiry across diverse
sites, projects, and activities.

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 4 A. Skukauskaitė and J.L. Green

Abductive Logic
Agar proposes that the ethnographic logic is “first of all abductive, from the Latin
for ‘lead away’” (par.59), leading from old ideas, knowledge, and researcher
points of view to new concepts and ways of seeing and understanding the
groups and social life we study. Drawing on philosopher Charles Peirce, Agar
(2013) argued that both inductive and deductive logics were closed systems
and worked with already existing concepts the researcher brought to the study.
In contrast, abductive logic enables discovery of new ideas and tracing of the social,
cultural, linguistic, and other phenomena that precipitated and created new
possibilities. In his book on Human Social Research (HSR, contrasted with
Behavioral Social Science, BSS) called the Lively Science (from German trans-
lation of Geisteswissenschaft), Agar (2013) wrote,

Abduction – and other nonmonotonic logics – fit the bill for HSR.
They allow for surprises and creation and revision. Learning where new
concepts come from was one of Peirce’s main interests. He noticed that
deduction and induction were closed with reference to the concepts used
by a researcher. With deduction it’s obvious. You start with the prem-
ises already in place. With induction it’s a little more subtle. You notice
X and Y, but the noticing is based on what you’re already predisposed
to see. In both cases, a researcher brings concepts into the science that
were already in place, ready to wear, salient, as the psychologists like to
say. Not with abduction. It’s designed for learning something new, for
reacting creatively to something you didn’t expect.

…. Abduction, the way I’m using it here, is about a creative reaction to a

surprise. It is a logic that engages the unexpected and creates new con-
cepts to imply it.
(p. 146)

Abductive logic “leads away” from old ideas and searches for new possi-
bilities. This abductive search for new ideas and ways of seeing is represented
across chapters in this volume, and in the interactional ethnographic principles
of stepping back from ethnocentrism (Green & Bridges, 2018; Heath, 1982)
and creating boundaries based on following the data and discursive references
of the participants (Bloome & Egan-Robertson, 1993; Green et al., 2012).
The nonlinear abductive search is anchored in the surprises Agar has called
rich points, and you will encounter rich points for the ethnographer almost
every chapter of this book. Rich points are unexpected moments impregnated
with potentials for new discoveries. As Agar (2013) puts it,

rich points… means is that something surprising happens that catches

a researcher’s attention. The reason it is “rich” – whatever words or

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 Ethnographic Spaces of Possibilities 5

actions it might refer to – is because it usually signals differences in lived

experience and intentionality between researcher and subject.
(p. 149)

In ethnography, rich points are everywhere (Agar, 1994, 2006) and can
happen at any time when an ethnographer, with their own disciplinary, the-
oretical, and life-experience-based ways of seeing and interpreting the world,
enters the lifeworlds of others and seeks to understand the different points of
viewing and living in those lifeworlds. As authors in this book demonstrate,
who we are as researchers and educators (e.g., Girdzijauskienė; Katz & Wilson)
and what theories and commitments drive us (e.g., Baker et al.; Guerrero et al.;
Hong & Bloome) shape what and how we study and where we encounter the
rich points. No research is objective or neutral; therefore, we aim to

• make transparent our positionalities, theories, histories, and interrelation-

ships and
• systematically unfold our logic of inquiry

so, you, as readers, can follow our arguments and explore your own rich
points and ethnographic spaces.
As Agar argues and authors in many chapters make visible (e.g., Baker
et al.; Skinner), rich points, often signaled through discourse, provide anchors
for abductive, iterative, and recursive explorations of the processes and mean-
ing-construction taking place in a particular group or site in which an ethnog-
rapher engages with participants. Discourse analysis, at the core of interactional
ethnographic studies, facilitates examining rich points in depth, uncov-
ering referential traces to other times, places, events, resources, and people
who influenced and are currently co-creating ways of acting, being, know-
ing, sense-making, and culturing in the particular group (e.g., Baker et al.;
Bridges; Castanheira et al.). The focus on discourse and languaging processes
also expose rich points stemming from often-invisible linguistic, social, and
historical presuppositions we all bring to social and cultural encounters and
research (Gumperz, 1982b; see also chapters by Hong & Bloome; Skukauskaitė
& Rupšienė, among others). The abductive logic allows the researcher to trace
back, forward, and in multiple other ways (e.g., Kalainoff & Chian; Skinner)
from a rich point to explore what participants and the researcher brought to
the situation, how they created the rich point, and how its layered mean-
ings and contexts reveal new concepts about the complex languacultural (Agar,
1994) processes and practices or life. The concept of languaculture signals the
inseparability of language and culture through which life and its meanings
are created; languaculture is discussed in multiple chapters (e.g., Baker et al.;
Skukauskait ė & Rupšienė; Katz & Wilson; Skinner). A rich point, exposed in
meeting of the differences between the researcher’s and participants’ langua-
cultures, opens doors for deeper understandings.

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 6 A. Skukauskaitė and J.L. Green

Iterative Logic
The backward, forward, and multidimensional tracing – from the discursive
construction of a rich point to new concepts revealing languacultural pro-
cesses and practices of life – is facilitated not only through abduction but also
through iterative and recursive processes of ethnography. These processes are
illuminated in most chapters of this volume. Solving one puzzle and under-
standing one rich point is not enough to understand ongoing languacultures
of a group in which, and with which, we conduct our studies. Therefore,
interactional ethnographers engage with participants as insiders (e.g., Baker
et al., Skukauskait ė & Sullivan; Guerrero et al.) and bilanguacultural guides
(Skukauskait ė & Rupšienė).
Ethnographic inquiry processes are iterative, from the Latin “repeat”, indi-
cating movement from one rich point to another, remaining open to new
discoveries, while also noting and creating ever-increasing focal context for
ethnographic analyses. As Agar (2006) explains, “Iteration means that the early
applications of abduction in fact change the historical context and create a new
one within which the next abduction will occur. And the change narrows the
focus” (par.73). This is evident in most chapters in this volume, most explicitly
in Kalainoff and Chian, Baker et al., and Skukauskait ė and Sullivan.
Iteration points to the need for an overtime engagement (Atkinson, 2017;
Walford, 2008), careful observation of the changing patterns of culture-
making and breaking (Collins & Green, 1992), and attention to discursive
construction of referential boundaries and connections that signal meaning-
ful actions and interpretations within the group and beyond (Bloome et al.,
2005; Castanheira et al., 2000; Hong & Bloome, this volume). Ethnographers
grounded in anthropology have demonstrated how iterative processes of the
ethnographic logic are constituted through principles of cultural relevance,
setting aside the researcher’s “ethnocentric” points of view, foregrounding
insider perspectives, and making connections and interpretations situated
in layered contexts revealed through careful study of meanings signaled by
members of the group (Green et al., 2012; Heath & Street, 2008; Kelly &
Green, 2019b).
Ethnographers, like authors in this volume, also demonstrate how itera-
tive processes often demand that we utilize multiple processes for generat-
ing data such as video and audio recording (see Bridges), interviewing (e.g.,
Skukauskait ė & Sullivan), varied forms of observation from distant to engaged
participation (e.g., Guerrero et al., Katz & Wilson; Skinner), arts-based meth-
ods (Girdzijauskienė), and working with archives (Baker et al., Kalainoff &
Chian, Castanheira et al.). By iterating or repeating the processes of observa-
tion, careful analysis, and meaning-making, ethnographers (re)construct con-
texts of relevance to insiders (Skukauskait ė & Girdzijauskienė, 2021), ground
their interpretations in the data and theories, and create warranted claims

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 Ethnographic Spaces of Possibilities 7

inclusive of participant points of view. This grounded warranting is further

aided by the recursive aspect of the ethnographic logic.

Recursive Logic
Recursive logic, from Latin “run back” or “run again” (Agar, 2006, par.78),
entails processes that enable ethnographers to explore and explain sequences
of events and rich points before returning to an earlier rich point, with a now
expanded and more grounded explanation of the initial surprise. You can see
such processes in chapters by Castanheira et al., Baker et al., Kalainoff and Chian,
and Skinner, among others in this volume. Agar, as well as other ethnographers,
have argued that usually many rich points happen at the beginning of field-
work but the richness of these points may fade and become indiscernible as the
researcher increasingly gets embedded and familiar with the site or group studied.
Recursive logic allows the researcher to return to earlier rich points after exam-
ining other languacultural processes and practices (see Baker et al. for a program
of research that follows this recursive logic). Recursive logic also signals when we
are “done” and have exhausted all possible explanations and trails, thus returning
to the anchor rich point, and revealing its languacultural action and meanings.
Explaining the relationship between recursion and abduction in ethno-
graphic logic, Agar (2006) wrote:

Abduction in ethnography is also recursive. Sometimes we use abduc-

tion right in the middle of abducting. A surprise happens and we pursue
it on the way to constructing a new H that explains it. But as we pur-
sue it, another surprise comes up, so now we need to pursue that. An
embedded sequence of abduction occurs as we explain one surprise after
another before we return to the original surprise. It’s not of course so
mechanical as that, but it is recursive in the sense of abducting in the
process of abducting.
(par.78)

This process of exploring sequences of events and new trails has also been
conceptualized as backward and forward mapping (Dixon & Green, 2005;
Green et al., 2003, 2017), interruption analysis (Green & Heras, 2011), mul-
tifaceted design (Green & Bridges, 2018; Green et al., 2015), and multilay-
ered analyses of contexts, processes, practices, and discursive construction
of everyday events in a group in time and over time (Bloome et al., 2005;
Kelly & Green, 2019b; Santa Barbara Classroom Discourse Group, 1992b;
Skukauskait ė & Girdzijauskienė, 2021). You can see such multifaceted and
conceptually driven IRA processes in all chapters in this volume.
The IRA ethnographic logic, as Agar refers to it, creates spaces for gen-
erating new concepts, working with participants in collaborative, culturally

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 8 A. Skukauskaitė and J.L. Green

and ethically responsive and responsible ways, and creating warranted claims
about complex processes and practices of everyday life in specific languacul-
tural groups. This book includes a variety of studies within the IRA logic,
foregrounding IE as the space in which discourse plays a crucial role in revealing rich
points and constructing culturally responsive interpretations of the languacultural actions
and meanings of, with, and for people with whom ethnographers work and study.

Interactional Ethnographic Spaces

IE as a logic of inquiry, or epistemology, emphasizes the role of discourse in
constructing and revealing languacultural processes and practices of every-
day life in diverse settings. The roots of IE can be traced back to the 1970s
and movements to deconstruct deficit models of students with diverse lin-
guistic, cultural, academic, and social histories. These roots were grounded
in interdisciplinary dialogues sponsored by the US government to develop
understandings of how language functioned in classrooms to support (or not)
overtime construction of knowledge by diverse learners in educational set-
tings (Cazden et al., 1972; Green, 1983).
In the 1990s, three major directions led to IE being a named epistemol-
ogy. The first was the founding of the Santa Barbara Classroom Discourse
Group (Green & Dixon, 1993; Rex, 2006; Santa Barbara Classroom Discourse
Group., 1992a, 1992b; Yeager this volume). The second was an invitation by
Cummings and Wyatt-Smith (2000) in Australia to contribute to a special
issue for Linguistics & Education, with other researchers who had developed
conceptual approaches to studying the complex worlds of educational spaces
of literacy-curriculum inquiry across levels of schooling. In this special issue,
Castanheira et al. (2000) were asked to make transparent how an interac-
tional ethnographic perspective could support a researcher in comparing
and contrasting the lived experiences of literacy for one student across five
classes. While not an ongoing ethnography, Castanheira et al.’s study drew
on conceptual arguments about ethnography (Spradley, 1980/2016) and dis-
course processes (Gumperz, 1982a, among others), and utilized a contrastive
ethnographic approach (Zaharlick & Green, 1991) to examine how varied
interactions between and among teacher, students, and curriculum afforded
different learning opportunities for the student and his peers. In these ways,
Castanheira et al. (2000) saw how IE was an epistemology and provided prin-
ciples for conceptualizing, studying, and understanding educational processes
and practices at different levels of time and analytic scale.
The third intersection were developments in the study of literacies across
languages and social domains grounded in work of Street (1984) and interna-
tional movements on literacies as social constructions (cf. Bloome et al., 2018;
Scribner & Cole, 1981; Street, 2001; Wyatt-Smith et al., 2011). Ethnographic
studies of literacy learning and everyday life across social, cultural, and

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 Ethnographic Spaces of Possibilities 9

academic spaces are at the center of IE studies and have led to ways of rethink-
ing what counts as literacies in changing worlds (cf., Bloome et al., 2005, 2018;
Street, 2001). This area of literacy studies, complements and extends work on
discourse in and across disciplines and social contexts nationally and interna-
tionally and thus, like discourse studies, is central to an IE logic of inquiry.
Building on this early work and the roots in interactional sociolinguistic
(Gumperz, 1982b; Gumperz & Hymes, 1972) and anthropological perspec-
tives (cf., Agar, 2006; Heath & Street, 2008) over the subsequent decades, the
IE epistemology deepened and expanded as it engaged with new disciplines
and theories (Green & Bridges, 2018; Kelly & Green, 2019b). Today, in con-
ducting IE research, interactional ethnographers explore the multifaceted pro-
cesses and practices through which people, in and through language-in-use
and interaction, continuously create particular dimensions of their (langua)
cultures-in-the-making.
Culture, from IE and related perspectives, is not a predetermined set of
patterns, traditions or belief systems, as a common use of the term suggests;
instead, culture is an active, ever-developing process, a verb (Heath & Street,
2008; Street, 1993), a dynamic action. In other words, we culture, or engage
in culturing, as we act and react to each other (Bloome et al., 2005) and interact
with the surrounding physical, natural, material, and human words (Hong
& Bloome, this volume). A group of people acting and interacting over time
in particular activities engage in culturing – creating ways of speaking, being,
acting, seeing, and meaning-making particular to the group. These languag-
ing-culturing processes and practices can be analytically uncovered through
an ethnographic focus on actions and what people do, and say, when, in what
ways, with whom and what materials, in what situations, with what actions,
reactions, and consequences.
The discourse focus of IE also enables studying how those actions are
enacted and become progressively consequential for individuals and differ-
ent collective spaces (Castanheira et al., 2000; Putney et al., 1999). Tracing
language-in-use, or discourse (Bloome & Clark, 2006), provides a grounded
methodology and a point of access to explore how languaging-culturing
relationships take place through the actions and perspectives of the insid-
ers, moment by moment and over time, in different configurations of actors
within and across social settings impacted by layered histories, policies, and
other sociocultural factors (Bloome et al., 2005; Heath & Street, 2008; Kelly
& Green, 2019b).
The complementarity of anthropologically and ethnomethodologically
(Heap, 1991, 1995) informed ethnographic logic and the discourse focus stemming
from literacy theories and interactional sociolinguistics creates an IE space
for in-depth, longitudinal, and contextualized studies of complex langua-
culturing processes in diverse sociohistorical settings. IE’s multidisciplinary
roots guide ways of conceptualizing, examining, knowing, and representing

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 10 A. Skukauskaitė and J.L. Green

the multilayered, multimodal, and multifaceted actions and interactions of

people co-creating their lives and meanings within and across times, spaces,
and varied configurations of actors (Castanheira et al., 2000; Green et al.,
2003). While offering a discourse-grounded orienting ethnographic logic, IE
remains open to explanatory theories (Green & Bridges, 2018; Green, Brock
et al., 2020; Kelly & Green, 2019a) which iteratively and abductively enter the
interactional ethnographic research space to create culturally and disciplinar-
ily responsive grounded warrants for groups and activities studied.
IE is a part of an ethnographic space guided by the IRA logic. IE and
related perspectives grounded in micro-ethnographic analyses of the discur-
sive construction of everyday life are making significant contributions to edu-
cation and other social science disciplines (Beach & Bloome, 2019; Kelly &
Green, 2019b; Skukauskait ė et al., 2015). As demonstrated across the chapters
in this book, this international interrelated network of ethnographic research-
ers is showing ways of studying moment-by-moment and overtime processes
in grounded, participant responsive, insider-perspective-accountable, meth-
odologically rigorous, and transparent ways.

Orienting Principles of Interactional Ethnography

Over the decades of IE development and uptake across disciplines and coun-
tries, IE scholars have published sets of interrelated guiding principles (Green
& Bridges, 2018; Green et al., 2003; Santa Barbara Classroom Discourse
Group, 1992b; Zaharlick & Green, 1991). While the wording may differ and
change based on the field and the goals of the volume in which IE work
is published, at the core, the principles are driven by the anthropological
perspectives and emphasis on discourse. Drawing on work of Heath (1982),
Heath and Street (2008), and Agar (1994, 2004, 2006), in a 2012 chapter for a
volume on research methodologies, Green et al. synthesized the IE principles
as encompassing:

• Nonlinearity of ethnography. Starting from a position that ethnography is a

non-linear IRA process (Agar, 2006), IE researchers engage in searching
for and chasing rich points, engaging in backward and forward mapping,
utilizing multiple data sources, constructing telling cases, and triangulat-
ing across data, theories, researchers, and perspectives.
• Leaving aside ethnocentrism. This principle directs our focus on the emic/
insider point of views and anthropological commitment to cultural rel-
evance and non-judgment. Leaving aside ethnocentrism demands that
we step back from personal views, theories, and knowledge we bring;
acknowledge the differences what we and the people in the local context
know; and engage in reflexivity, member checking, and collaborations
with participants and cultural guides.

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 Ethnographic Spaces of Possibilities 11

• Identifying boundaries. This principle foregrounds the discursive and infer-

ential nature of social actions and processes. It asks that we note language-
in-use and follow referential trails from participant discourse and actions
to identify relevant cases, documents, and focal areas for examination.
This principle also draws on comparative perspective in anthropology
and guides our work in constructing contrastive analyses within group
and across groups; within one source of data and across multiple sources;
within a day or data source and over time. We follow IRA logic, abducting
to make sense of what and how insiders propose, recognize, and construct
as socially significant within their situated activities and language-in-use
moment-by-moment and over time.
• Making connections. This principle focuses on part-whole relationships and
the holistic perspective in anthropology. It also draws on the notions of
intertextual and intercontextual nature of social life conceptualized by
education and literacy researchers (cf., Bloome, 1992; Fairclough, 1992).
Connections we make include connecting people, community, and study
histories; drawing on interrelated theories; and looking for interwoven
threads of actions, language, and understandings over time and spaces. IE
researchers also draw on multiple data sources to make warranted claims
and cross-case comparisons that demonstrate patterns of meanings and
activities across times, spaces, disciplines, and/or researchers.

Taken together, these principles guide IE researchers in constructing new ways

of knowing grounded in local and situated processes and practices among people
in their everyday social groups (Green & Bridges, 2018). The anthropological
and discourse connections among these principles also lead IE researchers to
develop ways of (re)presenting (Green & Bridges, 2018) social life in complex,
non-linear, and multifaceted ways at different levels of analytic scale and angles
of vision. The chapters in this volume enact and inscribe these ethnographic
principles across various sites and phenomena studied. The chapters are kinds
of telling cases that make visible the theoretical, methodological, and practical
potentials of the ethnographic logic of inquiry.

Chapters as Telling Cases

Each chapter in this volume is both a stand-alone exposition of the ethno-
graphic processes and practices of studying complex social and educational
phenomena and is a part of the whole of this volume through which we, as
authors and editors, make transparent conceptual and empirical potentials of
interactional ethnographic logic of inquiry. The chapters are a kind of telling
cases of ethnographic inquiry.
In the chapter on “Producing Data”, in a seminal edited volume on
Ethnographic Research: A Guide to General Conduct, anthropologist Clyde

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 12 A. Skukauskaitė and J.L. Green

Mitchell (1984) contributed a section, entitled “Case Studies”. He defined a

telling case study as:

…the detailed presentation of ethnographic data related to some sequence

of events from which the analyst seeks to make some theoretical inference.
The events themselves may relate to any level of social organization: a whole
society, some section of a community, a family or an individual. What dis-
tinguishes case studies from more general ethnographic reportage is the
detail and particularity of the account. Each case study is a description of a
specific configuration of events in which some distinctive set of actors have
been involved in some defined situation at some particular point of time.
(p. 237)

Mitchell defines telling cases as those that allow authors to make “theoreti-
cal inferences” from a “specific configuration” of events, actors, situations, and
times. He further argues that the “theoretical inferences” arise from a focused
study of “particular circumstances surrounding a case” (p. 239). Through
such systematic, in-depth studies of processes, practices, and circumstances in
particular social situations, ethnographers can make “suddenly apparent” the
“previously obscure theoretical relationships” (p. 239). To Mitchell’s argu-
ment about the theoretical potentials of telling case studies, we would add the
possibilities of making transparent conceptual and analytic logic of inquiry
as well as practical implications of systematic empirical ethnographic studies.

Organization of the Parts and Chapters

We organized the volume in three parts to encourage explorations of what and in
what ways the authors’ individual telling case studies in each chapter contribute
to the theoretical and analytic understandings individually and collectively. The
chapters can be read individually, within parts, and reorganized to fit different
logics and needs of the readers. We heuristically organized the chapters around:

• Conceptual foundations of IE as a languaculture and logic of inquiry

(Part 1),
• Methodological choices in generating research data and engaging with
participants (Part 2), and
• Constructing logic-in-use both in analyses of research data and in educa-
tional practice (Part 3).

The first part opens with Skukauskait ė’s and Rupšienė’s chapter in which
they conceptualize IE as a languaculture and offer the concept of a bilangua-
cultural guide as a mediator for the ethnographer as learner (or any novice)
seeking to learn IE logic of inquiry and enter the IE community. In the next

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 Ethnographic Spaces of Possibilities 13

chapter, Baker, Green, and Machtmes center their arguments on ethnographer

as learner and demonstrate how the ethnographer constructs an over-time IE
program of study to explore developing research questions shaped by partic-
ipants, ethnographer experiences, and IE as a logic of analysis. In the third
chapter in this part, Hong and Bloome offer a languaging perspective as a way
to conceptualize and make visible the social and discursive construction of
everyday life in an elementary classroom. Together, the three chapters make
visible the anthropological, educational, and languaging roots and processes of
IE as a languaculture and an inquiry process.
The second part of the volume encompasses chapters which focus on choices
and processes in conceptualizing and collecting research records and working
with participants in locally and culturally responsive ways. In the first chapter
of this part, Bridges demonstrates how video technologies facilitate systematic
inquiry and discourse analyses in interactional ethnographic studies. She offers
conceptual arguments, practical methodological suggestions, and demonstrates
how she and her teams have enacted video-enabled educational ethnographies
in clinical studies within higher education. In the second chapter of the part,
Skukauskait ė and Sullivan explore theoretical and methodological foundations
of conversational interviewing and demonstrate how IE principles embedded
in a conversational interview help researchers develop new concepts in col-
laborations with teacher and student research partners. The third chapter by
Girdzijauskienė draws on ethnographic theories of culture and presents arts-
based methods for constructing and analyzing data to uncover cultural levels
and their meanings in artistic practices of a young musician. Like other authors
in this part, Guerrero, Peña, and Dantas-Whitney emphasize the importance
of equitable and collaborative relationships with participants. In unfolding
their collaborative ethnography with children, Guerrero et al. demonstrate
how stepping back from their expectations and following the insider mean-
ings, ethnographers could uncover new, locally grounded, interpretations with
and about the site studied. Taken together, the four chapters in this part offer
ways of exploring relationships, processes, and tools, as well as dispositions and
experiences, ethnographers need to conduct socially just, locally responsive,
and participatory ethnographic studies that offer depth of understanding of
complex educational and social processes and lives.
The third part focuses on the ethnographic logic-in-use in constructing and
working with ethnographic archives, mapping complex processes of IE studies,
anchoring analyses in rich points, and enacting ethnographic observation princi-
ples in educational practice. The first chapter by Kalainoff and Chian offers two
telling cases which illuminate ways in which IE principles of conduct guided
researchers as learners in (re)formulating and unfolding analytic processes as
principled actions involved in ethnographic archiving. Offering the visual
representations of their axis of development, the authors make visible often-
invisible layers of work required in conducting studies in educational settings.

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 14 A. Skukauskaitė and J.L. Green

In the next chapter, Castanheira, Green, and Matchmes introduce guid-

ing principles grounded in the Interactional Ethnographic logic of inquiry
for mapping and transcribing the developing languaculture of a bilingual
classroom. Looking through IE lenses with different descriptive powers,
Castanheira et al. make transparent complex processes and practices through
which the teacher, with students, co-construct classrooms as developing
languacultures.
The third chapter in this part also unfolds an analytic logic-in-use for mak-
ing visible the languacultural nature of a group of elementary students and
their teacher engaged in an after-school Philosophy club. In this chapter, Kim
demonstrates how rich points can serve as analytic anchors for backward and
forward mapping to understand what, how, and why a rich point happens in
local interactions among children, texts, and the teacher. Teacher education
is the focus of the last chapter in this part. Here, Katz and Wilson unfold
their processes of rethinking participant observation and ethnographic actions
when encountering disconnects in their work as leaders in teacher education.
Drawing on ethnographic foundations, they demonstrate ethnography as a
way of acting in the field to understand differential perspectives of local actors.
Together the four chapters in this part show the potentials of the ethnographic
logic-in-use in mapping and unfolding complex languacultural processes of
studying diverse classrooms and enacting teaching practices.
The last part of the book includes two commentaries. In the first, Yeager
offers a reflective commentary about the ways she as a teacher, scholar,
and education consultant has enacted IE principles in her work with chil-
dren, researchers, teachers, and administrators. In the second commentary,
Kumpulainen, an international scholar, situates her encounters with IE his-
torically and explores contributions of IE to “possibility knowledge” and
to studying in nuanced learning across contexts. Sharing her own work in
Finland and Canada and her shift to studying socio-ecological justice from a
post-human perspective, Kumpulainen also poses intriguing questions of how
the continuously evolving IE logic of inquiry can respond to and address the
complex concepts and problems of our precarious times.
We offer this volume as an introduction to the IRA logic of IE and the ways
IE is enacted to study a variety of complex phenomena within and across social
and cultural settings around the world. By reconstructing their IE-guided
inquiry processes in different research contexts, the contributors have sought
to open doors for all who are new to IE as a way of thinking and knowing,
that is, as an epistemology. Through this grounded approach, readers have a
unique opportunity to explore:

• How researchers contributing to this book conceptualized ethnography,

discourse, and phenomena they study.
• How they engaged in discourse-based ethnographic research.

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 Ethnographic Spaces of Possibilities 15

• How they demonstrated ways of warranting (i.e., reporting on) the pro-
cesses and practices of their work and what was learned through their
inquiry processes.

The chapters do not offer prescriptions on how to do ethnographic and

interactional ethnographic work. Rather, the chapter authors invite all of us –
readers and authors – to explore IE concepts, processes, and practices so we
can engage in dialogic explorations of how we can learn with, from, and build
on each other’s work.

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