Explore the vast range of titles available.

In this paper the author himself tells an auto-ethnographical tale about how he came to read and understand Paul Willis’s Learning to Labour (1977) in the late 1970s as a 22-year-old non-qualified junior high school teacher of Finnish ‘lads’ whose parents had come to Sweden as industrial workers in the late 1960s and early1970s. While most of these ‘lads’ came to reproduce class, the author himself continued to higher education to become a ‘class traveller’. Hence, cultural production and cultural autonomy can work in more than one way, even at the very same time.

This article is an introduction to a Special Issue dedicated to Paul Willis’s classic Learning to Labour at its 40th anniversary, and beyond. His theoretically informed and theorizing ethnographic study is read, explored, and utilized all around the globe. Its use also stretches across the borders of social, cultural and educational sciences and to manifold research areas and settings. Besides laying out its main content, that is, the answers to the question of how working-class kids let themselves get working-class jobs, this article argues that the most significant contribution of Willis’s study is the way it illuminates, both theoretically and empirically, the meaning of cultural production and cultural autonomy in the midst of ongoing social reproduction of class. This introduction ends by presenting the eight contributions to the actual Special Issue, and with an invitation to Paul Willis himself to take issue with cultural production and cultural autonomy.

The paper starts by stating a possible meaning of ethnography within cultural sociology. Then follows an investigation of the ‘normative sense’ in human life that ethnographers not only tend to investigate but also inhabit themselves. The main purpose is to argue that this normative sense needs not necessarily to be shunned, but can be justified as an urgent, conscious, and explicit constituent that enacts theoretically inspired and meaningfully illuminating ethnographic endeavors. This is done by a positive construction and an immanent critique of cultural sociologist Isaac Reed’s work on interpretation and social knowledge, i.e. different forms of epistemic modes, which in this paper is labeled the theoretical, the empirical and the utopian referent, or the pragmatics of grounded re-signification. The paper ends by trying to state the interlaced relationship, or subscription, between these theoretical, empirical and utopian re-significations and the possibility of a thrice-blessed social criticism. Thus, this is what it could mean to take the normative sense seriously.

Difficulties distinguishing the ethnographic object and the ethnographer’s analysis can pose a challenge to the conduct and dissemination of ethnographic work. The close distance between ethnographic observation and the ethnographer’s interpretation elides the boundary between considerations of theory and method. In his book, Interpretation and Social Knowledge, Reed describes interpretivism as an epistemological approach aimed at harnessing the potential of social explanations developed in ethnography’s interstitial position – the space between theory and social reality. This issue of Ethnographyc provides a forum for ethnographers coming from different theoretical positions and working in different empirical areas to reflect upon on the value and limitations of interpretivism in ethnography.

Nearly one in three students living in the segregated, multicultural city of Malmö, Sweden, fails to finish school with a completed diploma. To remedy this situation, students can attend introductory programs, but only some students who do so end up with a diploma. The aim of this article is to understand why young people from a migration background drop out of secondary school and why some of them drop back in and become school achievers. We explore what makes learning matter among youth who drop back into schooling. In seeking possible answers to this question, we listened to and learned from the students themselves. We hope readers will learn about the elementary forms of an enabling opportunity structure for school achievement, about the significance of relational capital, and about the deeply associated meanings of family and friendship and their importance to school success. The article is framed by the interdependencies of two conditioned temporalities: the temporality of the past — that is, the dropping-out process — and the temporality of the present, that is, the dropping-back-in process. We argue that school failure is not an inevitable phenomenon, and show that young people who are supported to drop back into schooling can discover that they are capable of learning with passion and perseverance.

This chapter discusses the “elementary forms of ethnography” and an ethnographic imagination that can illuminate lived forms of schooling. These elementary forms include lived experience, cultural understanding, theory, or rather theorization, and social criticism. The chapter shows what a particular understanding of ethnography can do for a science of education understood as schooling. Ethnography is as old as the modern formation of sociology and science of education more than a hundred years ago. Ethnography is a vital tool to be used in the interrogation of schooling thus understood as a cultural fact involving or aiming at the willing consent of pupils to achieve its purposes. At the heart of education as schooling as a cultural fact pure and simple is teaching and learning. Moreover, teaching and learning as schooling need to be grasped in their indispensible relationship.

This chapter discusses the “elementary forms of ethnography” and an ethnographic imagination that can illuminate lived forms of schooling. These elementary forms include lived experience, cultural understanding, theory, or rather theorization, and social criticism. The chapter shows what a particular understanding of ethnography can do for a science of education understood as schooling. Ethnography is as old as the modern formation of sociology and science of education more than a hundred years ago. Ethnography is a vital tool to be used in the interrogation of schooling thus understood as a cultural fact involving or aiming at the willing consent of pupils to achieve its purposes. At the heart of education as schooling as a cultural fact pure and simple is teaching and learning. Moreover, teaching and learning as schooling need to be grasped in their indispensible relationship.

This chapter discusses the “elementary forms of ethnography” and an ethnographic imagination that can illuminate lived forms of schooling. These elementary forms include lived experience, cultural understanding, theory, or rather theorization, and social criticism. The chapter shows what a particular understanding of ethnography can do for a science of education understood as schooling. Ethnography is as old as the modern formation of sociology and science of education more than a hundred years ago. Ethnography is a vital tool to be used in the interrogation of schooling thus understood as a cultural fact involving or aiming at the willing consent of pupils to achieve its purposes. At the heart of education as schooling as a cultural fact pure and simple is teaching and learning. Moreover, teaching and learning as schooling need to be grasped in their indispensible relationship.