ABSTRACT
This chapter carries out a review of how network ethnography has been utilised in education research. As a transdisciplinary methodology, network ethnography is a combination of social network analysis (SNA) and traditional ethnography, in that it draws upon and is influenced by each. Network ethnography is relatively new and under-utilised in the field of education, with one of the first landmark studies drawing upon this method being Ball and Junemann (2012) in their study of policy networks, governance and ‘new philanthropy’ and again in subsequent works by Ball and colleagues (Ball, 2012, 2016; Ball et al., 2017; Junemann et al., 2018). Following from this, network ethnography has been overwhelmingly taken up within the field of critical policy studies in education, commonly used to explore philanthropy, and interrelated fields of governance and policy networks. Therefore, by discussing the fundamentals of network ethnography and reviewing how it has been taken up in educational research, this chapter aims to provide a practical guide for scholars and research students engaging with the methodology. In doing so, it discusses how the methodology is used to generate data but also how it seeks to make knowledge claims and original knowledge contributions in the field. This chapter identifies critiques and limitations.
