Oxford Ethnography and Education Conference

The Oxford Ethnography and Education Conference (OEEC) is held annually in September in Oxford, England. The conference has existed since the late 1970s and early conferences resulted in edited volumes featuring the work of Peter Woods, Martyn Hammersley, Paul Atkinson, Sara Delamont, Andy Hargreaves, Stephen Ball, Andrew Pollard, Colin Lacey and many others. The conference is now linked to the Ethnography and Education journal (set up in 2006 by Bob Jeffrey, Geoff Troman and Geoffrey Walford), as well as the Ethnography Network (Network 19) of the European Educational Research Association (EERA).

The conference, as well as its associated networks and publications, promote and support the work of educational ethnographers from across the globe. We welcome participants from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, for example, sociology and anthropology, as well as those working within education departments. Our priority is to support ethnographic research involving long-term engagement with those studied in order to understand their cultures and represent their perspectives. We value research which uses multiple methods of generating data and which recognises the centrality of the researcher in the research process.

The conference is deliberately small and prides itself on providing a supportive atmosphere of lively debate and discussion. We accept about 60 papers each year; these are distributed prior to the conference and the expectation is that the 40 minutes session given to each paper, is used to discuss the presenter’s research with an engaged audience who have read the paper in advance. We attract delegates at different stages in their careers and welcome the involvement of doctoral students who regularly find the format of the conference extremely useful. In recent years our delegates have come from the United States, South America, Europe, the Near and Far East, South East Asia, as well as Australia. The conference serves as one of the main sources of papers submitted to the journal Ethnography and Education.

The Call for Papers for the 2024 conference is now open.