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Despite their success and importance in educational research, interpretive approaches still reflect the heritage of a Western-biased hermeneutics, which often over-emphasizes the role of the "hermeneutist", of the interpreter, thus neglecting the self-reflexive role of the "object" of interpretation and her/his active participation in the act of interpretation itself. In this contribution, we aim at highlighting the necessary complementarity of hermeneutically inspired ethnographic research traditions, on the one hand, and collaborative, dialogic and/or participatory approaches, on the other hand. Accordingly, after a short conceptual introduction on the role played by diversity as a research topic, in the following we first develop the methodological reasons which lead us to combine and integrate interpretive ethnography and collaborative research. Then, we detail our own hybrid methodology through ethnographic example from an ongoing project we are carrying out in Mexico, before we finally sum up the role played by interpretation in a reflexive and dialogical ethnography.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-9282-0_31

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