There has been a rising acceptance of autoethnography in the past 15 years. Instead of studying social phenomena, in an appropriately reflexive way, some scholars have taken to researching themselves. Drawing on concrete examples from an ongoing ethnographic project, the paper contrasts the beneficial, even essential, practices of autobiographical and reflexive thinking about fieldwork with the narcissistic substitution of autoethnography for research.

This paper explores a dominant feature of the professional socialization of doctoral students in laboratory and field sciences: the harsh reality of struggling to get laboratory experiments and other forms of practical research to `work'. As undergraduates, young scientists have experienced success in their practical work because they are exposed to stage-managed experiments, demonstrations or similarly controlled environments. They encounter a world of stable and predictable phenomena under controlled conditions. In contrast, each generation or cohort of graduates has to learn that everyday research in the field or in the laboratory does not necessarily produce stable, usable results until they have mastered tacit craft skills. In turn, they then learn to remove all mention of those tacit, indeterminate aspects from public accounts of their research.

Capoeira, the Brazilian dance and martial art is now globalised and taught widely outside Brazil. Instruction is provided by Brazilians who are living in self-imposed exile from their homeland. The authentic capoeira that such teachers provide is a major attraction for non-Brazilian students. However, there is little research available on the motivations and strategies of overseas capoeira instructors. Building on a long term ethnographic study, this paper showcases the goals and strategies of one successful Brazilian teacher, from the Beribazu Group of Capoeira, working in the UK. This teacher reflects upon his four interlocking aims for his students and the strategies for achieving them. They should develop social cohesion, appreciate Brazilian culture, play good capoeira and learn to move their bodies acrobatically, flexibly and beautifully. Two sociologists embed the teacher's perspective on his work in an analytic framework derived from Bourdieu.

The Brazilian martial art, capoeira, is popular in many countries outside Brazil, including the UK. Capoeira is generally taught by Brazilians whose livelihood depends on recruiting and retaining enough paying customers to keep their classes economically viable and socially pleasurable for the students. The teachers also have to establish and maintain authority over their students who are young adults with many other ways to spend their time and money. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in three British cities, the ways in which teacher authority is established, challenged and maintained are explored, including claims to authenticity, physical prowess, race, renaming the students, and skill on the dance floor.

The sociological study of education involves focusing upon teaching and learning, upon explicit instruction and the acquisition of the tacit knowledge and skills that are essential if learners are to become enculturated into a new habitus. Sociological insight into these processes can come from research on conventional educational settings, but is greater when unfamiliar, settings are studied. This paper focuses upon a pedagogic setting of an unconventional kind – a martial art, capoeira.

In James Elroy Flecker's poem The Gates of Damascus, the poet imagines four exits from the safe comfortable city to the outside world. Each gate takes the traveller into a different set of temptations and dangers. The Aleppo Gate leads to trade and commerce, the Mecca Gate is for faith and pilgrimage, the Lebanon Gate is for exploration and the search for enlightenment, and the Baghdad Gate leads to danger and even death. When we educational researchers leave our safe city, our ivory tower, our Damascus, we can choose which gate we take: that is our destination, our goal, our methods. The paper will explore the choices that face educational researchers, and the consequences of those choices. Issues of funding, faith, exploration and danger will be discussed with examples from controversies about educational research.