Critical ethnographies from Houston: Distinctive features and directions

This chapter has outlined the version of critical ethnography under development at the University of Houston and used in all subsequent chapters for specific field projects. The sort of critical ethnography we practice from Houston has been designed to tighten qualitative social research, win a broader audience to published qualitative studies, develop new methods of data analysis and bring together other methods within a single methodological perspective, and skirt the bottomless pits of totalizing relativism as it has been advocated by various postmodern and poststructural researchers over the past decade. The chapters following this one each illustrate uses of the methodological theory adumbrated above.