It is soon time for another season of FinEd Online Research Talks (FORT)! Our FORT events comprise one-hour online talks on current topics, showcasing the wide variety of research in educational sciences conducted in FinEd’s member universities. The FORT events are targeted particularly for PhD researchers, but other members of the scientific community, as well as all other interested parties, are also warmly welcome. Participation is free, hope to see many of you there!
Monday 31.3.2025 at 12:00–13:00
Class in the class: middle-class habitus and the silence of social class in schools, Professor Sonja Kosunen (University of Eastern Finland)
In this presentation, I examine the boundaries of social class, its silence and the differences it produces in schools. In general, social class is still rarely discussed in connection with schools and teaching in Finland, although it influences several school-related phenomena, such as school choice, school segregation and the differentiation of students’ educational paths. In this presentation, I present an analysis on teachers’ perceived social class and its visibility (and invisibility) in teachers’ work from a Bourdieusian perspective. I also discuss class as a factor mediating career-related choices, i.e., how teachers view social class as having shaped their education, housing and moments related to applying for and choosing a job. I understand that the habitus mediated by the teacher’s class background functions, on the one hand, between the middle-class school and the students, and on the other hand, in relation to the middle-class school itself. Although the teachers currently perceive themselves as middle-class in terms of their professional status, income and education in the interviews, not all of them originally had a middle-class background. In this case, the habitus formes a hybrid, in which the working-class background was combined in the discourse with the current ‘lived class’, which many of them consider to be partly useful and partly harmful when working in a school environment.
Link to Prof. Kosunen’s talk https://uef.zoom.us/j/65397350964?pwd=oh8MTwPxsOMmAaf1ffKEWXJEjpVMvN.1, Meeting ID: 653 9735 0964, Passcode: 243044
Monday 5.5.2025 at 12:00–13:00
(Digital) Ethnographies in a postdigital age: Examples from four studies, Associate professor of education Fredrik Rusk (Åbo Akademi University)
Networked digitalization has changed conditions not just for education but for sociality, as spatial boundaries are changed when online digital technologies are inherently embedded in the everyday. There is no clear-cut line between what is on- or offline. Instead, the divide is more akin to a porous cell membrane, which can be referred to as ‘postdigital’. This is a methodological challenge for pedagogical research interested in social phenomena, such as ethnographic research: How can we get access to the interwoven reality of participants’ contemporary everyday lives?
In ethnography, there are currently variations that address online fields in different ways, such as netnography (Kozinets, 2012), virtual ethnography (Boellstorff, Nardi, Pearce, Taylor & Marcus, 2024) and connective ethnography (Hine, 2007), to name a few. Now, digital ethnography (Taylor, forthcoming) seems to be the latest in that it, in a sense, emerged from fact that digital and analogue lives have blended together to create a form of ubiquitous hybridity. For me, all of the above are ethnography.
In this talk, I will open up the concept of digital ethnography and ask whether or not we, as ethnographers, simply have to deal with the fact that the digital is part of what ‘ethnography’ is today. I will do this by presenting and critically discussing four projects that are all digital ethnographies, however wildly different in how they approach the digital. From lower secondary students’ socialization in school, to esports teams playing, to an exclusively online youth center, and finally to the omnipresence of an administration platform at schools. Through insights from ethnographic work in these four settings, I discuss possibilities for ethnography to stay relevant in the postdigital, without losing its strengths of being situated, relational, and consensual.
Fredrik Rusk is an associate professor of pedagogy (teacher education) at Åbo Akademi University in Vasa. His research involves ethnographic, ethnomethodological and conversation analytical studies using diverse data to critically analyse social organization, identity, culture and learning from participants’ perspectives both in- and outside of the classroom/school, and in-and-through diverse digital and screen-mediated interaction, such as smartphones, social platforms, video conferences and video games.
Link to Assoc.Prof. Rusk’s talk https://uef.zoom.us/j/67947363242?pwd=tX0JCvuLlgRa6y97eQVyHr3puJo64M.1, Meeting ID: 679 4736 3242, Passcode: 981196
