We discuss educational inquiry as a dialogic research art, contrasting it to the ubiquitous positivist scientific paradigm in humanist sciences. In our study of self-identified Bakhtin inspired educators, the voices of participants are heard and treated as voices of the consciousnesses with equal rights, rather than objects of investigation. The main enterprise of dialogic research art is to deepen dialogic meaning making through unlimited critical dialogue among diverse participants. We focus on what pedagogical events may mean to the practitioners themselves and their students (emic) and to the others (etic) by bringing them in a dialogue with each other.

This paper draws from Karen Barad?s (2007) neologism "ethico-onto-epistem-ology," a term that marks the interconnectedness of ethics, ontology, and epistemology (p. 409). Following her challenge to the foundationalism of traditional scientific research, I posit that ethnographers cannot be disentangled from their research sites and are thus inseparable from the subjects whom they have the task of observing. My aim is to recuperate Barad?s theory of agential realism and situate it within a site-specific conversation about my own ethnographic work with an out-of-school summer writing program. This piece is a Work-in-Progress.

Taking seriously calls for rethinking ethnography to recognize the critical role of relationships requires thinking of ethnography as an everyday mode of being in the world, not a silo of knowledge production achieved in academic spaces. Participatory ethnography challenges traditional notions surrounding the nature of relationships in research, what constitutes the ethnographic location, researcher identity and accountability, and the process of reporting research. Using the concept of heterotopia, this work in progress paper builds on calls for sincere ethnography and a radical reflexive praxis to illustrate what these spaces might look like in the everyday work of ethnography in schools.