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National Curricula need to be interpreted in terms of the cultures and experience of learners and adjusted accordingly, for example a literacy and history curriculum needs to include perspectives relevant to the local culture. Teachers, learners, families and communities mediate, appropriate, subvert, and challenge the processes of policy implementation, curriculum engagement and pedagogic practices to make educational experiences more meaningful. These articles exemplify the conflicts, the coping strategies and resolutions adopted by those at the policy implementation interface. Examination of these processes using ethnographic methods identifies and characterises these tensions and provides research findings that can be used to construct lasting solutions that are commensurate with complex situations. The writers in this volume have carried out ethnographies that illuminate educational disjunctions, ambiguities and tensions, agency, strategic action and resolution. Their methodology enables them to show, in detail, how incongruencies arise, how contexts affect interactions, what kind of agency operates, and the circumstances leading to resolutions. Six articles focus on educational inequality, three on identity development and we include three that discuss methodological issues of partisanship in researching equality issues.

The prime focus on the social processes of schooling within educational ethnography has tended to marginalise or eschew the importance of other 'informal' educational sites. Other social institutions, such as family, community, media and popular culture, work and prisons are salient arenas in which behaviours and lives are regulated. They all interrelate and are all implicated in the generation, management and development of social identities and the social and cultural reproduction of structures and relations. Individuals, though, are not merely shaped by these social institutions, their agency is evident in the way they creatively adapt and accommodate to the tensions and constraints of economic, educational and social policies. The maintenance of self in these situations requires identity work involving mediation, conflict, contestation and modes of resistance, which often contribute to a continual reconstruction of situations and contexts. This volume of "Studies in Educational Ethnography" focuses on identity and agency in a variety of social institutions in educational ethnography. The contributors explore these themes in a wide range of international contexts including: Belgium, Sweden, North America, South Africa and England. They demonstrate the capacity of educational ethnography to provide accounts of participants' perspectives and understandings to highlight the agency of educational subjects.

What counts as ethnography and what counts as good ethnography are both highly contested. This volume brings together chapters presenting a diversity of views on some of the current issues and practices in ethnographic methodology. It does not try to present a single coherent view but, through its heterogeneity, illustrates the strengths and impact of the debate. The collection includes chapters on the ethnographic research process; the use of photographic diaries; the idea of toleration in the research process; and the personal aspects of research. It has chapters that question generalisation; perceive ethnography as a potential form of surveillance; analyse the notion of display in ethnography; critique the way culture is commonly theorised; and examine the possibilities of comparative ethnographic work. It also includes and exchange of views between Martyn Hammersley and Barbara Korth on partisan research.

The prime focus on the social processes of schooling within educational ethnography has tended to marginalise or eschew the importance of other 'informal' educational sites. Other social institutions, such as family, community, media and popular culture, work and prisons are salient arenas in which behaviours and lives are regulated