Min-Zhan Lu

The problematic of experience : redefining critical work in ethnography and pedagogy.

the populations they work with and the changes that may arise from that work. Both thus face the challenge of negotiating differences and power. The course of these negotiations, we argue, depends on what experience is taken to mean and how it can be used. Signs of this convergence between ethnography and composition pedagogy appear in both the shared ideals and the shared dilemmas reported in recent accounts and critiques of such projects. We have in mind those projects which attend to the politics of their research and teaching methods in pursuit of their commitment to socially emancipatory ends. Many ethnographers and teachers might see themselves as working for socially emancipatory ends (if defining these in different ways), and presumably all would be concerned with methodology. For us, however, critical ethnography and pedagogy approach methodology not strictly in terms of its efficiency in producing or transmitting knowledge to inform subsequent (social) practice but in terms of its effects as social practice. Critical ethnog