This article examines the symbolic boundary work that is carried out at a school whose student population is heterogeneous in terms of ethnicity and class. Based on ethnography, the article demonstrates how the school's staff seeks to neutralize ethnic boundaries and their accompanying discourse, while the pupils try to bring ethnic boundaries back in and place the interethnic encounter prominently on the school's agenda. [symbolic boundary work, ethnicity, ethnic boundaries, integration]
In this article, we propose “ethnographic biography” as a research strategy designed to address the basic difficulty of qualitative studies in capturing the temporal dimension of human action and experience. This difficulty is particularly salient when the subjects are dispersed in space and their contacts with the researcher are repeatedly interrupted. To overcome these discontinuities in space and time, the “ethnographic biography” combines complementary research tactics: Alongside biographical follow-up interviews — the commonly acceptable approach to resolving the temporal challenge — we propose two additional ethnographic methods: focused observations of social events and ongoing interactions with the subjects in virtual spaces. The advantage of that set of methods lies in that each method which locates the encounter between the researcher and the subjects in a different space and captures a different temporal dimension.
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