Zusammenfassung
Recently in Germany – and already for a long time internationally – ethnography has proved to be a reference point for a socially and epistemologically informed reflection on methods and methodologies across the sub-disciplines of educational science and its neighbouring disciplines. In this context, the theme ‘publics’ can be set as an international and interdisciplinary “boundary object” (Hörster et al., 2013) that allows for a more rigorous reflection of blurred boundaries between ethnography and pedagogical fields as well as further ‘non-academic’ fields with respect to methodological, political and ethical questions.
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Notes
- 1.
Arendt (1958, p. 41) writes: “With the emergence of mass society the realm of the social has finally, after several centuries of development, reached the point where it embraces and controls all members of a given community equally and with equal strength”. In mass society behavior is the focus instead of action, bureaucracy instead of personal rulership (Arendt, 1958, p. 45). What Arendt calls mass society is similar to Foucault’s visibility in a disciplinary society. These descriptions of society show how individuation on the one side and homogeneity on the other side come together. While Foucault’s strength is an analytical description of the procedures which enable this form of society, Arendt is more interested in how to change this form of society in the public realm, and what the conditions of publicness are. Therefore their use of the term of power is pretty different. “If Foucault’s non subjective power controls [..] by creating a visibility that separates and homogenizes human beings, the Arendt’s power is the potential that enables human to break away, or more precisely, to disrupt the hold of Foucauldian power” (Gordon, 2002, p. 134).
- 2.
Arendts matters of ‘distinctivness’ and ‘difference’ has to be understood as social positioning of collectives not just a question of identity (Benhabib, 1996, p. 28).
- 3.
If educational ethnography enables plurality in terms of bringing new demands to how to institutionalise education and social work, the division between the privatised voices and the public are questioned as well as what is acknowledged as universal and what as particular (Rancière, 2011, p. 65).
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Hünersdorf, B. (2022). Going Public? Educational Ethnographies and Its Publics. An Introduction. In: Hünersdorf, B., Breidenstein, G., Dinkelaker, J., Schnoor, O., Tyagunova, T. (eds) Going public?. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-34085-8_1
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