Abstract
This chapter discusses the development of a productive circuit of observation and transformation of discursive practices regarding normalcy and difference in educational institutions. In addition, a conceptual and methodological analysis of the complex relationships between ethnography and intervention are presented. In working with educational institutions, both processes were nominally raised and sequentially planned as different processes. However, the boundaries between the ethnography and the intervention proved to be difficult to establish. This may be due to the fact that the study of the production of normalcy and difference is based on a political and transformational positioning that makes determining the limits of each impossible. Ethnography is a mode of intervention, and this intervention is nurtured, facilitated, and acquires meaning through ethnographic observation. In this chapter, I focus specifically on interventions associated with a professional development process for practicing teachers, but also on a more general understanding of the process of creating public policy that considers difference. The chapter discusses the instruments used for documenting the ethnographies and intervention such that they may be used or replicated in future research studies.
I would like to thank Anita Sanyal for her help in the interpretation and editing of this chapter in English from the original in Spanish.
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In regard to these approaches, the debate reported in Revista Espirit (April–May 1972) in which M. Foucault and J. Donzelot (among others) participate should be consulted. In addition, the following report that was published 26 years later in the same magazine (March–April 1998), in which R. Castel, M. Autés, and J. Donzelot, among others participated can also be consulted.
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Rojas Lasch, C. (2019). Discomfort—Affects, Actors, and Objects in Ethnographic Intervention. In: Matus, C. (eds) Ethnography and Education Policy. Education Policy & Social Inequality, vol 3. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8445-5_4
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