Chapter 3 Ethnography and Education Policy. A Critical Analysis of Normalcy and Difference in Schools

Abstract This chapter critically analyzes the production of normal and deviant identities in schools through the production of ethnographic texts. The chapter advances the argument that dominant notions of time and space facilitate an apolitical stability of subjects’ cultural and social positionalities as presented in five school ethnographies. Studying the political, material, epistemological, and affective production of identities considered normal in school settings requires questioning the representational habits we (researchers) maintain when producing knowledge using ethnographic methods. I argue that there is a “habit of mind” that presses the replication of dominant representational templates of the biological, social, cultural, and affective compositions of those we observe, the spaces they inhabit, and the temporal stages defining how they behave.