Ethnography and Education

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The (im)possibility of poststructuralist

ethnography researching identities in borrowed
spaces

Georgina Tsolidis

To cite this article: Georgina Tsolidis (2008) The (im)possibility of poststructuralist ethnography
researching identities in borrowed spaces, Ethnography and Education, 3:3, 271-281, DOI:
10.1080/17457820802305501

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17457820802305501

Published online: 29 Aug 2008.

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 Ethnography and Education
Vol. 3, No. 3, September 2008, 271
281

The (im)possibility of poststructuralist ethnography

borrowed spaces

researching identities in

Georgina Tsolidis*

School of Education, University of Ballarat, Ballarat, Victoria, Australia

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The notion of site is critical to ethnography and provides a sense of spatial stability

somewhere the researcher enters in order to research what is contained within. Using
contemporary understandings of space, the author reflects on two studies to explore the
(im)possibility of poststructuralist ethnography. The first study was undertaken in a
real school utilising a multi-method approach over a long period of time. The other was
conducted in community-based schools where minority language and culture are taught.
Such schools operate on a part-time basis and are often referred to as after hours
schools. These operate, as if by stealth, in borrowed spaces
schools not in use by their
normal classes, during normal school times. The nature of these schools necessitated
utilising different research approaches. The almost transient nature of after hours
schools reinforce temporal
spatial instabilities as critical to understanding site as social
rather than fixed.
Keywords: ethnography; poststructuralism; ethnic minority; community-based schooling

Introduction
The experience of researching with young people in schools is vexed. Issues of speaking
with and speaking for are pronounced as researchers walk the fine line between
ventriloquism and reportage as nave realism. Such issues have become particularly
pronounced given the so-called postmodern turn. This paper is written assuming that there
is no turning back the significant challenge posed to the possibility of ethnography going
out there to find a truth. It is the ethnographers responsibility to account for their
situationality and authorial power through reflexive research practices. I would like to
argue this is most particularly the case in relation to dominant cultural locations at this
point in time, when the culture wars promulgate suspicion about the significance of
cultural difference, including within our schools.
The aim of this paper is to reflect on two very different studies. Both were conducted in
schools, each with the aim of privileging student perspectives, including those from
minorities. Each study was framed assuming the (im)possibility of ethnographic research;
that is, each was shaped by the assumption that ethnography writes the real through the
words of researchers. However, while positivist research represents fiction as fact, I am
reluctant to collapse such categories totally. Instead, I am drawn to the analysis provided
by Popoviciu, Haywood, and Mac an Ghaill (2006) who note the need for ethnographers,

*Email: g.tsolidis@ballarat.edu.au
This research was supported under Australian Research Councils Discovery Projects funding scheme
(project DP0557512). The views expressed herein are those of the author and are not necessarily
those of the Australian Research Council.

ISSN 1745-7823 print/ISSN 1745-7831 online

# 2008 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/17457820802305501
http://www.informaworld.com
 272 G. Tsolidis

particularly those working in education, to consider the methodological challenges

instigated by poststructuralist epistemologies. They state:
A question that remains is how far ethnographers engage with the post-structuralist claims of
the multiplicity of selves, notions of de-centred forms of power and the intersections of highly
relational social categories. (Popoviciu, Haywood, and Mac an Ghaill 2006, 410)

I wish to contribute to the exploration of this question by reflecting on two school-based

studies. Most particularly I will consider the relationship between site, space and
subjectivity and in relation to this, how ethnography, including non-traditional ethno-
graphy, can reinscribe privilege. The argument is made that spatial
temporal possibilities
foreshadow privilege not only through interpretation and analysis but significantly,
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through the repertoire of methods available to the researcher.

Doing ethnography
There is ongoing exploration of the complexities involved in doing ethnographic research,
particularly amongst researchers who are sceptical about the possibility of capturing a
truth. Such researchers emphasise reflexivity as a means of laying bare the researchers
situationality and the power relations implicit in the research dynamic (Britzman 1995;
Stronarch and MacLure 1997). The argument made is that as researchers we need to
account for the perspective implicit in our gaze and its potential to colonise those we
describe (Wise and Fine 2000). This is particularly necessary in education where we often
work with students who are young and in environments where power dynamics work
against them in explicit ways. While ethnographers may not be teaching students directly,
they are nonetheless in positions of relative power and aligned quite naturally with the
range of institutional practices associated with the disciplining of young people.
Acknowledging that ethnography is more than reporting a truth has led to
exploration of the possibility of doing ethnography differently. This involves acknowl-
edging and addressing various power relations within the research dynamic, including
those involving the researcher. Saukko (2003), for example, describes a new ethnography.
Such an approach aims to acknowledge the validity of the personal, including the
emotional side of lived experience. The personal brings to light perspectives or experiences
that may not be constituted through the dominant discourses. Further to this, there is a
need to understand that the researchers capacity to do this is limited by the perspective
implicit in their situationality and their authorial power. In order to fracture the singularity
of the authors place and voice, Saukko advocates the inclusion of various modes of writing
and presenting material. However, there is an acknowledgement that lived experience is
situated within wider social processes and structures that need to be scrutinised. Thus, new
ethnography represents a balancing act . . . of being true to the lived and being aware of
the commitments and limits of its truth (Saukko 2003, 56).
Alvesson and Skoloberg (2000) use the metaphor of the market to describe different
approaches to knowledge. They argue that the domination of the financial market in the
1980s led to the dominance of ways of thinking that privileged the sign . . . elusive images
or chimeras which live their own ephemerous and capricious lives without being moored to
any other reality than themselves (159). The 1990s, however, were marked instead by
recession and less optimism in the free market model. This in turn led to an exploration of
postmodern thought as markocentric. Alvesson and Skoloberg put forward an alternative
to a market view of knowledge, one that works between absolutely sovereign actors and
 Ethnography and Education 273

absolutely sovereign textuality. Instead they place an emphasis on dialogue, not as

mediation of meaning, but as a means of creating knowledge in a discursive field. This
does not mean a rational, perfect, noise-free communication; noise, friction, misunder-
standing, irritation and trouble will always be there, and are indeed a precondition for
the process (159). This is creating knowledge through noisy dialogue, a process in which
neither the actors nor the dialogue are sovereign.
Researchers, including Saukko and Alvesson and Skoloberg, account in various ways
for poststructuralist epistemologies within ethnography. Such views were brought to bear
on the two school-based studies that are the focus of this paper. There was an assumption
of noisy dialogue, mediated by the researchers reflexive stance. There was an aim to accept
the limitations and situationality of a truth and in this way consider both subjectivity and
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institutional context. The first study was conducted in a mainstream school and the other
was conducted in schools established to support the maintenance of ethnic minority
language and culture. (These studies are described further below.) As a researcher who
accepts the importance of adopting a reflexive stance, the aim of this paper is to explore
these two studies as a means of speaking to ethnographic possibilities more broadly. What
can the experience of doing ethnography in two very different sites tell us about the
potential for ethnography to account for poststructural epistemologies? Site is critical to
ethnography and the argument being explored here is that the different character of the
sites involved in these two studies is significant in helping us think through broader
methodological issues. Because of this, the notion of space is being harnessed as a means of
exploring the (im)possibility of poststructuralist ethnography.

Space and site

The so-called spatial turn in social theory is one that challenges the Euclidian view of
space as a container that captures or holds. Instead, space is viewed as a dynamic between
social and material relations, which are characterised by power. This view of space takes
into account both the material and the social with enormous explanatory potential for
education. Schools or classrooms, for example, are not seen as places within which
teaching and learning are contained, but instead as part of the pedagogic dynamic whereby
the material conditions influence the social relations and vice versa. McGregor (2004)
comments that, rather than pre-given and timeless, we need to understand space as
emergent, arising out of relations between individuals, including those who may not be
present at a given time. In this context it is imperative to consider the relationship between
space and time or spatiality. Spatiality allows us to safeguard against reinstating a binary
between space and time and simply reversing their order of significance (Usher 2002).
Paechter (2004) discusses spatial metaphors and how these speak to various under-
standings of pedagogy. In her exploration she deconstructs these metaphors as a means of
laying bare the taken for grantedness of a range of unequal power relations. What
becomes core curriculum, for example, illustrates inclusion and exclusion through
mapping knowledge fields. In the spirit of Paechters argument about the significance of
metaphor, I wish to consider how space and time conspires to make one school real and
the other unreal. As with all categories, including metaphorical ones, this one is imposed
and risks reinscribing the dichotomy it challenges. Nonetheless, I persevere with it, in part
because it assists to illustrate how space is not neutral, nor container, but instead
prescribed by and in turn producing of, a range of unequal power relations that respond to
social and material conditions nuanced through time. Here my interest is in culture and the
 274 G. Tsolidis

processes enacted through school spaces that inscribe some cultures as lesser than others
and how this may impact on students identity work.
The first study was conducted in a mainstream school which is described here as a real
school relative to the ethnic minority schools, which are described as not real. In the case
of the former there is permanency, predictability and social processes that provide a sense
of fixity. In the case of the second study, the schools were in perpetual flux. Whilst classes
were held in school buildings, these occurred while real school was over. Time conspired
to make these spaces unreal because they were marked by the activities of those teachers
and students who used them during normal school times. They were shaped by the people
who were no longer there, but whose work was on display, whose names appeared on
shelves and whose books and belongings filled the room. In this way, these ethnic minority
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schools operated in borrowed spaces, at other times and thus remained peripheral to the
core of real schooling. To this extent they were also unreal.

Real and not real

Naming something real in contradistinction to that which is not real, brings into focus
the nature of reality. Following Zizek and his reading of Lacan, the real is understood here
as the void that needs to be occupied in order to stand outside the ideology that defines
what is otherwise taken to be real (Zizek 1994). In his essay on the September 11 attack on
the World Trade Center towers, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Zizek continues his
engagement with the film The Matrix. The title of Zizeks paper is spoken by a character
from the film when he introduces the hero Neo, to the reality that exists beyond the
chimera manufactured by the artificial intelligence which has taken control of the world.
Rather than streetscapes, there exists only desert. Zizek concludes that;
Virtual Reality is experienced as reality without being so. However, at the end of this process of
virtualization, inevitable Benthamian conclusion awaits us: reality is its own best semblance.
(Zizek 2006, 269)

The Virtual Real characterises our everyday condition and is, according to Zizek, a
generalised form of reality deprived of its malignant substance
coffee without caffeine,
cream without fat and beer without alcohol. Through such omissions . . . reality itself is
deprived of the resisting hard kernel of the Real (Zizek 2006, 269 original emphasis).
This provides an evocative framework within which to consider after hours schools
and their relationship to real schools. Within the borrowed spaces that are used by other
students at other times, can these schools constitute a Virtual Real? If so, does the cultural
difference they come to symbolise constitute the malignant substance expunged from the
hard kernel of the Real?

Ethnography in real spaces

The first of the studies I wish to describe was conducted in a mainstream, full-time day
school. The aim was explore the experience of attending a high performing Government
school, that is, a school that facilitates students access to elite universities. The study was a
consideration of school choice within the public sector, most particularly in relation to
student identification and how various subcultures facilitate or hinder academic success,
understood in normative terms (Author 2006). This study was situated in relation to a
range of debates about school choice, school effectiveness, student subcultures and
 Ethnography and Education 275

identities and access to higher education. The primary aim was to consider students lived
experiences of a school that was located ambiguously
elite within the public sector but
relative to top-performing private schools, under resourced in the sense of both material
and cultural capital.
The case-study school was chosen because the students achieved some of the best
results in this sector. This was determined on the basis of statistical mapping of both other
Government schools and private schools likely to attract students within the vicinity. The
study was a multi-method ethnography. I maintained a research relationship with the
school for over two years. In this period, I conducted interviews and scrutinised
documentation related to the school. I participated in and observed the everyday life of
the school through attendance at special events and just milling around. Additionally
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figures related to university admissions were analysed in order to place this school and its
students in a broader context. The aim was to be student-centric and invited reflection on
the possibility of interpreting student experiences as both a valid form of research and also
a form of ventriloquism
a means whereby researchers talk through the mouths of those
with whom they speak.
The methods adopted assumed a research stance and perspective on the constitution of
knowledge that, to a great extent, was in sympathy with poststructuralist theorisations.
Implicit in the research were a range of tensions. In line with the arguments mounted by
Saukko (2003) there was an aim to acknowledge the validity of the personal, including the
emotional side of lived experience, as well as bring into light perspectives or experiences
that may not have been constituted through the dominant discourses. The aim was also to
understand that the researchers capacity to do this is limited by the perspective implicit in
their situationality and their authorial power. Various modes of writing and presenting
material were used in an attempt to evoke lived experience and its representation. However,
I also acknowledged that lived experience is situated within wider social processes and
structures that need to be scrutinised. New ethnography represents a balancing act . . . of
being true to the lived and being aware of the commitments and limits of its truth
(Saukko 2003, 56).
The school chosen for the study was a legitimate space. It had a site of its own, a
building, sports grounds and facilities such as a gymnasium, library and computer
laboratory. There was a timetable through which space and time were regulated. The same
staff and students were anticipated each day and on the whole, they arrived and left as
expected. Students wore a uniform, knew the room where their classes would be held and
assumed that the necessary equipment would be there ready for use. Most commonly we
assume these features as constituting schools. I mention these unsurprising features
because they are taken for granted and we rarely reflect on how they facilitate our work as
ethnographic researchers. Their worth became evident to me by contrast when I began a
study in after hours schools.

Ethnography in borrowed spaces

The second study was an exploration of diasporic identification (Tsolidis and Kostrogriz
2005). The Melbourne Greek community was the focus and argued as an exemplar of
processes whereby minority cultural identification is maintained over many generations,
including through various types of schooling. In Melbourne there are three full-time
schools run by the Greek community; however, none of them were willing to be involved in
this research. Ongoing consultation with various people, including principals and Board
 276 G. Tsolidis

members, illustrated the research duress such schools experienced. These people described
researchers, most often not sharing the cultural background or aspirations of the schools
and their communities, wanting to do research, very much on students and teachers rather
than with them. Topics ranged from bilingualism, psychological research on adjustment
issues and research related to the success or otherwise of the schools bilingual and
bicultural pedagogies. Given this justifiable research fatigue, our study was instead situated
within after hours schools.
By contrast to real schools, after hours schools operate in borrowed spaces (Tsolidis
and Kostrogriz in press). These are run in school buildings, church or community halls
once or twice a week after the legitimate occupants have left. On a Saturday morning or a
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Tuesday or Thursday evening the students and teachers who gather in these spaces cannot
assume the facilities others take for granted. The photocopiers may not be available, the
staff room may be locked and even equipment critical for health and safety, such as fire
hoses, may not be accessible. In other words, little is predictable and little is supported by
on-site structures. These students and their teachers fill the spaces left behind by others.
There is a feeling of perpetual non-belonging and transience
small classes in large rooms,
someone elses artwork on the walls, notices that refer to other people, times and irrelevant
events. These classes are conducted out of boxes
materials collected by teachers for whom
this is a labour or love, that squeezes full-time careers elsewhere. Classes are established on
a more fluid basis also, given the vast variation that may exist between students language
and literacy levels and their ages.
Another important factor that needs to be taken account of in this context is that for
many students, there is a deeply felt tension about attending Greek school. This is not a
preferred activity for many students who would prefer to be playing sport with their peers,
shopping, taking up part-time work or simply relaxing. Not only is Greek school extra
school, it is a type of school, linked as it is with family, church, folkloric dancing etcetera,
that does not immediately conjure the cultural markers with which young people would
wish to identify. Put starkly, Greek school is not cool. The reluctance to attend such
schools is felt deeply within the community because of concerns for language loss. There is
less take up of Greek language with the result that it is diminishing within universities.
These are major issues for a community that is no longer a migrant community. In this
context, after hours schools need to entice students to attend and make the experience
enjoyable, while simultaneously satisfying parents that their children are indeed learning
Greek language and culture. These aims can exist in tension with each other.
There is a range of reasons why such schools operate with a relative lack of structure
that extends to issues such as attendance, curriculum and how various classes are
established. While ethnographic studies have been carried out at complementary schools in
other contexts (Creese, Bhatt, and Martin 2006; Wei 2006) the schools involved in this
study, while typical of schools where Greek language and culture are taught in Australia
may be markedly different to schools of this type that support other communities,
particularly those more recently arrived. These differences are a result of community
characteristics and expectations as well as histories of migration. One of the arguments
being mounted here is that diasporic communities are more complex than those
understood as migrant and that the resulting fluidity that characterises them is reflected
in social and material structures that challenge how we understand the relationship
between ethnography and site.
 Ethnography and Education 277

Ethnographic possibilities
In this section of the paper I wish to reflect on the possible impact of site on ethnography.
Social theory that understands spatiality as responding to and shaping material and social
relations is taken as a starting point. Within schools, theory related to spatiality has been
used to provide insights into how power is played out through a range of relations
including pedagogic ones. Here the interest is to extend this argument to research and
explore its potential to reinscribe unequal power relations. By understanding site in spatial
terms the aim is to explore minority/majority cultural relations and the possibility that
these can be reiterated through ethnographic research.
The first study was based in a real school. As such there was a timetable, student
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attendance was mandatory and monitored. The buildings were well presented and access
was predictable and timely. The school operated through well-resourced administration,
which extended to the upkeep of files. Documents were available including through a
website. Students arrived and left at given times were in specific classes and the
coordinators were available to facilitate coordination of interview schedules. In short, it
was relatively straightforward to conduct ethnographic research through observation,
document analysis and interviewing. Under the circumstances adopting the stance of a
(dis)interested participant observer and interviewer was possible. The system was unlikely
to notice me given the momentum its weightiness generated. The structures in place gave
me access to files and data, including records kept over many years. Students were there
every day, all day. Missing one class for an interview was easy and not costly. This is not to
suggest that there were no silences or that the research process was benign in terms of
giving voice to particular perspectives. On the contrary, I have argued (Tsolidis 2006) that
those who remain hidden are those whose stories are likely to have most salience in this
regard. Nonetheless, my intention here is to compare this study with that conducted at
schools that cater for ethnic minority communities, described here as unreal. In the
second study the possibility of using similar methods was seriously challenged.
It had been anticipated that conducting research in after hours schools would be
difficult. The intention was to integrate the study into classroom practice. A fully trained
and experienced bilingual teacher of Greek was employed to conduct classes, using
curriculum relevant to the study and to the existing syllabus. In each school this was
negotiated with the principal and relevant teachers. The schools informed the parents and
sought their consent. This teacher/researcher developed or already had long-term
relationships with the schools and staff. Because she already had legitimacy in the area,
having taught and developed related curriculum and policy at the State level, the project
could be squeezed into a shorter time. The time she was able to spend in each location
varied from several weeks to almost a year. This depended on a range of complex issues
including curriculum, timetabling, relationships and availability of senior students. The
teaching was aimed at creating portfolios through which students represented themselves
using text, images and artefacts and in the language of their choice. These portfolios, which
were anticipated to form cultural self-representations, became the data for the study.
Whilst this process generated useful and insightful data, I wish to reflect on how such
research sits alongside what is commonly identified as ethnographic research. When
originally envisaged, this strategy was going to be supported by a range of ethnographic
methods including participant observation, interviews, analysis of school records, policy
and curricula. Very little of this was possible. Document analysis was not possible because
in borrowed spaces there are no offices, no filing cabinets and no central registry where
 278 G. Tsolidis

students details are kept. In short the researcher cannot assume ready access to such data.
There are limited processes that facilitate predictability. Teachers are often volunteers and
students do not come to school with levels of language that can be related easily to age.
Because of this, the timetable can be fluid and unpredictable. There is a pressure to make
the experience enjoyable, particularly important given the negativity that can surround
going to Greek school. What are the incentives for learning Greek in an Anglophone
community where second language acquisition is not commonplace? Further to this, the
language marks the speaker as different in the eyes of their peers
this is a type of
difference not coveted. Because of this many schools punctuate the classes with activities
such as dance, watching films, cookery activities, etc. Perhaps the most important factor is
the amount of time available. In most cases, each class runs for between two and four hours
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a week. For the ethnographer, this factor alone spells disaster.

At such schools, students work most often does not dovetail with the formal systems
of evaluation and accreditation. As a result, there is an ambivalence that surrounds the
nature of the work undertaken and the zeal with which it is approached. Perhaps more so
when students consider doing work for researchers, even when the researcher is a visiting
teacher. We relied on students good will to do the right thing. There were many instances
of students handing in unfinished and illegible work. We guessed at the range of possible
reasons. Curricula remained invisible to us either because it did not exist in a formal way or
because the school was a commercial venture and there were rivalries that made Principals
reluctant to place materials in our hands. There was also a fear of comparative evaluation

both in terms of intra-community expectations of such schools, as well as perceptions that
we were experts scrutinising work undertaken in these schools.

Ethnography as privilege
Within ethnography observing, interviewing and analysing texts remain sacrosanct,
including for those of us who are attempting to engage with poststructuralist epistemol-
ogies. Yet it is important to consider what can be learnt about methodological issues when
the possibility of using such methods is restricted. We need to consider what assumptions
are implicit in the processes we take for granted as part of ethnography and how these
shape the range of meanings possible. If not, methods remain a means to an end
a way of
gathering the data which provides us with the opportunity to debate epistemology through
the interpretation of the data. Here I would like to explore the relationship between
methods and interpretation in relation to spatiality. Space and time are understood as
critical towards determining the methods available to the researcher and therefore the data
it is possible to interpret. In this sense, spatiality has the potential to mark the character of
ethnography. The aim is to bring spatial politics into this research mix and consider the
possible impact of such politics on the research process. If reflexivity is important, it should
extend to the spaces we occupy for research and their possible impact on the data
collection and analysis. This is particularly the case if spatiality is considered to mediate a
range of unequal power relations, extended here to include those between the researcher
and the researched. Unless we are reflexive about such spatial politics, as researchers we
risk reinscribing rather than challenging hegemonic relations. Most particularly, we need to
reconsider the link between site and ethnography in order to accommodate the epistemic
spatial turn. Ways of conducting ethnography that assume site as place, somewhere to be
entered in order to gather requisite data towards gleaning meaning, need to be considered
afresh. If space is defined through complex social relations, ethnographic methods need to
 Ethnography and Education 279

be situated more creatively. In this paper, this is being explored in relation to the near
impossibility of conducting real ethnography in unreal schools.

Reflexive researching of the other

By reflecting on two studies conducted in very different spaces, I have argued that spatiality
is likely to have a significant impact on methodology. In the case of the after hours school,
the data collection process was hampered by a lack of structures taken for granted in other
types of schools. In terms of analysis this lack of suitable structures could be construed as a
lack more broadly evidence that these are not real schools because they function
differently to schools in the mainstream. And as such real ethnography is not possible.
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Instead I would like to argue that they illustrate the need for ethnography without place, an
approach which is in keeping with the imperatives of a globalised era, characterised by
borderlessness. This is an approach that assumes the significance of spatiality, including for
the research process itself. Ethnography without place is as much a necessity within a site
as it is across sites
within a school or with reference to global networks of people. This
research in after hours schools illustrates this argument. These spaces shifted in time and
in response to those who occupied them during Greek classes and those who marked them
differently during mainstream schooling. The fluid and unpredictable nature of school
structures and student and staff attendance necessitated different ways of researching, in
terms of methods, interpretation and reflexivity. We need to be mindful of spatial politics
and what these tell us about the capacity of research to reinscribe culturally privileged ways
of seeing.
Spatial politics in this instance need to be considered in relation to ethnic minorities
and the location of their languages and cultures in Australian society. While Greek, for
example, remains one of the most spoken languages in Victoria, it is taught in only a few
mainstream schools. Instead many thousands of students elect to learn it by attending
community-based schools (Tsolidis and Kostrogriz in press). Yet for most students, this
consigns their learning to spaces that reinscribe the peripheral status of their cultures in
Australian society. McGreggor (2004) argues that it is through school spaces that students
learn their place in the adult world. Students draw meaning from the interaction between
social and physical space, particularly as it is imbued with power relations. This
interpretation of spatial politics provokes a depressing insight when considered in relation
to after hours schooling. In borrowed spaces these students learn the status of their
culture and language in Australian society. While there is a need to extend our
understandings of these issues, as researchers we need to be mindful of the potential of
our work to redefine minorities as peripheral through research in such spaces.
As researchers our gaze has become fractured to the point where there is questioning of
whether we can still have something useful to say to those concerned with the practice
of education. Yet the critiques offered of standpoints that eschew adequate consideration
of their privilege continue to resonate, particularly in a climate where difference is
constructed as increasingly problematic in the context of the so-called war on terror and
the culture wars. The hierarchy of nations that characterises globalisation and influences
the way resources are distributed between and within these, has increased the need for
vigilance against the potential for epistemologies to colonise and appropriate. By adopting
a reflexive stance the aim is to consider how research can of itself be a colonising practice.
This will be explored in relation to after hours schools relative to real schools and how
our research practices are shaped through spatial
temporal possibilities. Under such
 280 G. Tsolidis

circumstances, the type of research possible is affected and this needs to be considered in
relation to what we can come to understand about both the research outcomes and the
processes through which these are developed. There is specific interest to understand how
ethnographic research, even when this is not intended to be traditional, assumes a range of
structures that may not be available, including to the researcher.
Massey (1992) argues that it is necessary to oppose the time/space dualism in order to
appreciate the social in relation to the multiplicities of space
time. She puts this forward
most particularly in relation to cultural identities, suggesting that rather than historical
narrative, such identities should be considered as a production of a number of different
differences at one moment in time (Massey 1992, 83). Such identities are multiple,
simultaneous and produced through the here and now, rather than historically salvaged. In
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the context of after hours schools this allows us to contemplate different differences
the
Greek of the Virtual Real schools existing side by side with the real Greek of diasporic
networks that link family and home to the here and the elsewhere, produced as a dynamic
characteristic of cosmopolitan vision. It is diasporic communities, through their insistence
on maintaining forms of difference, which are emblematic of globalisation and the tension
between cultural hybridity and homogenisation that sits at its core. In this context, the
Virtual Real of after hours schools can be juxtaposed to other forms of the lived
experience of diaspora through research that aims at exploring related identification as
spatial. Such experience transcends boundaries of place, including nation, to move through
global networks. By connecting local through to global spaces, a rich picture can be
provided that challenges site as the must have of ethnography.

Conclusion
I have argued that the possibility of using traditional ethnographic methods is challenged
when research is being conducted in Australian after hours schools, where Greek minority
language and culture are taught. Such schools are constituted in borrowed spaces intended
for use by other people at other times. As such, these schools are transient and defy the
relationship between ethnography and site. An insistence on ethnographic methods that
presume stability of site would reinscribe the peripheral status of cultural difference
through our research. The balancing act . . . of being true to the lived and being aware of
the commitments and limits of its truth (Saukko 2003, 56) needs to be applied to
methods as well as the interpretation of their outcomes. Ways of researching are themselves
hindered in response to marginality. It seems plausible that with regard to marginal
locations it may be possible to do research that adopts a colonising stance, where sites and
people are scrutinised in undemocratic ways.
The intention in this paper has been to reflect on two very different school based
studies as a means of engaging with ethnographic research more broadly. The first was
situated in what has been described as a real school. The second, by comparison, has been
described as not real. The argument has been made that ethnography most commonly
assumes a real and in so doing reinscribes privilege. If real ethnography is privileged how
do we learn about those in marginal locations without reinscribing their marginality
through our assumptions about appropriate ethnographic methods? It is in this context
that I find Zizeks notion of refusal of choice very helpful (Tsolidis 2006). In his paper,
Class Struggle or Postmodernsim? Yes, please! Zizek (2000) draws on the other Marx
(Groucho) to highlight what for him is a major issue for those of us concerned with
reconciling old fashioned politics with new ways of theorising. Zizek concludes through
 Ethnography and Education 281

the words of Marx (Groucho) that answering Yes please! to the question, Tea or coffee?
is a refusal of choice which is an equally apt response to the either/or choice; class
struggle or postmodernism? This conceptual framework releases us to consider both
school-based studies, albeit significantly different in nature, as legitimate ethnography. In
other words, if as ethnographers, we are serious about engaging . . . with the post-
structuralist claims of the multiplicity of selves, notions of de-centred forms of power and
the intersections of highly relational social categories (Popoviciu, Haywood, and Mac an
Ghaill 2006, 410) we need to refuse a range of choices
time or space, real or not real
schools and proper or improper ethnography. Instead we have to develop creative
methods that align to spatiality rather than remain restricted by site.
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