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Critical Ethnography Critical ethnography is a relatively new mode of qualitative investigation and one in need of further elaboration, discussion, and debate. Critical ethnography shares the methods of traditional ethnography, such as by seeking the emic perspective gained through intense fieldwork, but it adds an explicit political focus. This focus places critical ethnography in a unique position to examine power-laden social and cultural processes within particular social sites. More specifically, critical ethnography can be defined as a research methodology through which social, cultural, political, and economic issues can be interpreted and represented to illustrate the processes of oppression and engage people in addressing them. Critical ethnography is a relatively new research methodology. However, critical ethnography has its roots in the well-established tradition of anthropological ethnography. Critical ethnography grew out of dissatisfaction with both the atheoretical stance of traditional ethnography, which ignored social structures such as class, patriarchy, and racism, and ...