Paper short abstract:

What are the methodological implications of the concepts of 'researcher' and 'fieldwork' when conducting a praxiography? Drawing on a thesis project fieldwork in preschools the concepts will be discussed as theoretically extended when used in addition to the traditional ethnographic context.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation will discuss the concepts of 'researcher' and 'fieldwork' by extending traditional ethnography with a praxiographic methodology (Mol, 2002). Cases drawn from a multi-sited fieldwork in three preschools will explore the relation between what, how and where knowledge about Early Childhood Literacy is produced, when entangling neuroscience within the framework of the preschool educational practices. The fieldwork is organized in periods of alternately participation in the preschool practices and the teacher meetings; producing observations and documentations that will be discussed with the preschool teachers, interwoven with examples of brain research, in order to discuss and develop the daily preschool literacy practices.

Consequently, in this presentation of research situated in praxiography, data cannot be "collected" but rather be seen as generated in the intra-actions that arise and where the researcher is also included. Praxiography is based on the assumption that reality is relational-material and thus multiple, which methodologically displaces the researching gaze from the distantly observed to the relationally produced (Law, 2004). By that, the producing researcher is always already involved and foregrounds the networks that co-constitutes human, material and discursive actors and practices.

This presentation will discuss how the role of the researcher must be revised in order to elaborate on the questions of how different network enactments will frame and shape the field that the fieldwork is carried out in. Furthermore, a core question is how significance is displaced when interest is paid to how practices are constituted and produced, not to a defined context or place?