Networked Together:

Designing Participatory Research in Online Ethnography

The third edition of Rethinking Educational Ethnography: Researching on-line communities and interactions is organized by the Institute of research on population and social policies of the National Research Council of Italy (IRPPS-CNR) and the network of Sociology of Education of the Italian Association of Sociology (AIS-EDU), at the University of Napoli ‘Federico II’, in collaboration with EERA Network 19.

This conference forms part of a long-term discussion that began in Helsinki at ECER 2010, when participating researchers discussed emerging concerns about virtual ethnography and discovered a shared interest. In 2011 this debate gave rise to the first annual Rethinking Educational Ethnography: Researching on-line communities and interactions, conference, held at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Porto and organized by Educational Research Centre(CIIE), and to a second gathering within the EERA Network 19 in Berlin. In 2012, the second annual Conference organized by the Centre for the Study of Change in Culture and Education (CECACE) and the Department of Educational Management, and held at the University of Barcelona permitted the circulation and the debate on emergent practices in the field of online educational ethnography.

The third edition, while building on the knowledge generated in the previous meeting, will invite ethnographers in different fields of research (not only in education), and those involved in ethnographic investigations in diverse disciplines (anthropology, sociology, etc.) to present and discuss contributions on the challenges of researching on-line communities and interactions for ethnography, by promoting opportunities and exchanges at the epistemological, methodological and theoretical level.