Whose side are you on? Advocacy ethnography: some methodological aspects of narrative portraits of disadvantaged young people, in socially critical research

Abstract This paper is primarily interested in opening up a strategy to counter the increasing silencing of perspectives resulting from the press towards "evidence-based" forms of research. We argue that all researchers have interests, declared or otherwise. What we advance in the paper is an approach to ethnography that is inclusive of the lives, perspective, experiences, and viewpoints of the least powerful. Methodologically we demonstrate something of how we have explored the intellectual craft and possibilities of portraiture as a way of advancing the notion of advocacy ethnography. Keywords: portraituresocial disadvantagecritical ethnographyvoiced researchadvocacy ethnography Acknowledgements Notions of portraiture in ethnography have been a signature approach of our research for over a decade, and in that time we have received generous grants from the Australian Research Council to whom we express our considerable appreciation. The ideas in this paper were supported in particular by two Australian Research Council Grants – a Linkage Grant project "Enhancing school retention: school and community linkages in regional/rural Western Australia" (2005–2007 by Smyth and Down), and a Discovery Grant project "Individual, institutional and community 'capacity building' in a cluster of disadvantaged schools and their community" (2006–2008 by Smyth and Angus). We also acknowledge the schools and communities who have worked with us, and the courageous way in which Peter Lang Publishing has been prepared to take on our experimental style in four recent books in which we have used the approach. Our grateful appreciation to the two anonymous reviewers and the QSE editors who helped us improve the paper.