About ethnography

The conceptual innovation of oikoethnography is a new kind of ethnography, drawing from autoethnography (Ellis 2004) and collective biography (Gonick et al. 2011), highlighting the intersubjectivity of experiences. In oikoethnographical method, the emphasis is on the multi-sited experiences that the applicant and her family expose themselves to during months of fieldwork in various destinations. In this communal form of autoethnography, “household ethnography”, the researcher and her family will record and reflect their experiences as temporary migrants or visitors in various counties and locations. The aim is neither to produce an omniscient description of the experiences of mobility, nor to claim that their limited experiences could in any way be generalisable or even comparable with the experiences of emigrants or refugees, but to emphasise the intersectional, intersubjective, situated, partial knowledges (Haraway 1988) and contextual experiences on mobilities, here from the perspective of a middle-class white family with two school-aged children, encouraged to “international mobility” by the support and requirements of the academic funding system. (From my unpublished research plan, Saresma 2015.)