Performance-Based Ethnography

Performance ethnography invokes both familiar and strange recollections regarding a set of practices, methodological innovations, and epistemic orientations and challenges. This is particularly true when considering the ways performance, ethnography, and education intersect. Delving into the pedagogy, politics, and possibilities of performance ethnography in qualitative educational research, this article highlights the implications, deployments of, and engagements with the methodology in the field. To do so, key definitional offerings of performance, ethnography, and education are provided, enactments of performance ethnography within educational research, contexts, and applications are examined, and the “politics of doing” as a tool in performance ethnography is proposed. Upholding the contested nature of performance studies, this article outlines the utility of bridging performance, pedagogy, and education to foster new possibilities for teacher-student dynamics, the facilitation and understanding of embodied knowledges inside and outside schooling contexts, as well as how educational research can be conceptualized.