Postcritical Ethnography

The authors introduce postcritical ethnography, both as a historical epoch that followed the failures of and departures from critical ethnography and as a set of engagements in qualitative inquiry. Discussing critical turns toward emic approaches to research, interpretivism, and Critical Theory, the authors provide historical context for what became critical ethnography and the crisis of representation. They address the influence of postmodernism and post-structuralism on both and the epoch of postcritical ethnography that followed. Detailing postcritical ethnography as a way to orient to and engage in inquiry, they describe a set of engagements common to the epoch—engagements with power, particularity, partiality, provisionality, participation, persons, perspectives, positionality, and possibilities. Inviting researchers interested in working toward a more just world to consider postcritical ethnography, the authors share contemporary postcritical work and highlight common threads—methodological and theoretical complexity, researchers’ experiences of responsibility and obligation, positionality as relation, and researchers taking permission to create qualitative work anew with invention and discovery.