Multi-sited Global Ethnography and Elite Schools: A Methodological Entrée

In this chapter, the authors outline why and how they developed and deployed the notion of multi-sited global ethnography to study elite schools, globalization, and social class formations and expressions. They offer some selected glimpses of the narratives and insights that arose through their inquiries. The authors look at the intersections between two conceptual frameworks: M. Burawoy's framework for global ethnographies: global forces, global connections, and global imaginations; and framework for sociological inquiry into elite schools: identity, curriculum, culture, community, and nation/national context. These are the key elements identified by ethnographic and other research as central to the elite schooling/social class nexus. This matrix focuses attention both on the institutional life of the school and its more extended communities, and on the ways they are interwoven with global forces, connections, and imaginations.