Collaborative Ethnography: An overview of pervious works about and with children and adolescents in Mexico

Abstract

This article is the first approach to investigate about collaborative ethnography with children, teenagers and youngsters in Mexico. Its objective is to analyze, by taking into account 20 publications, the way this type of ethnography has developed in this country. It also shows how, attaining different degrees of collaboration, this way of being, doing and writing ethnography has being used by fields such as applied linguistics and education. Also, we are interested in reflecting, with the 20 publications, on how collaborative ethnography with children, teenagers and youngsters, allows decentralizing researcher-participant power relationships, as well as rethinking the role games that take place in this type of interactions. Thus, in this article it is important to discuss how, in the representation of the Other –those that are generally taken into account as research objects but not as subjects who have the right of self representation- it is possible to achieve not so vertical practices throughout the implementatio of auto ethnographic and auto biographical exercises, which results in the co-research, co-interpretation, and co-authoring the production of knowledge, deconstructing, in turn, the role of the ethnographer and the ethnographic writing.