Few political ethnographies have tracked everyday realities of citizenship before and after the Arab uprisings. This chapter explains the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of the study, situating it in relation to the relevant works on Egypt and the region. It sets out the approach of studying the production of lived and imagined citizenship in schools, situating the study within the sociology and anthropology of education. It identifies the key parameters for approaching lived citizenship in schools in terms of the focus on privatization and austerity on the one hand, and violence and discipline on the other. It charts how the research approaches the production of imagined citizenship in schools through analysis of textbook discourses, rituals and everyday student and teacher narratives.

This chapter presents ethnographic narratives on immersion in Chechen social life, reflections on the role of positionality and subjectivity in shaping the research, the ethics of the study, and grounded perspectives on the key elements of the argument: legal pluralism, conflict, and the foundations of social and political orders in Chechnya. The chapter starts with one extraordinary Chechen woman’s family history, which illustrates life in Chechnya during the time of the Soviet Union, the troubled times of de facto Chechen independence in the 1990s, and during the Chechen wars. The chapter then explores the roles of outsider status, language, religion, and gender in the co-production of knowledge between the researcher and study participants. In the following part, the chapter presents a thick description of the functioning of legal pluralism and the traps of orientalist romanticization and essentialization in studying it. Next comes a description of extended family as the principal social organization in contemporary Chechnya, which debunks the stereotypes of the all-powerful Chechen clans. The chapter documents the lived experiences of dictatorship and violent conflict and then turns to a discussion of the ethics of the study under these conditions.

This chapter situates the research in a mixed method framework with ethnography at the core. Ethnography emphasises that contexts for communication should be investigated rather than assumed and that the detailed analysis of linguistic data is essential to understanding its significance. It has been claimed that this informal knowledge about what can be said to whom, and how, has been overlooked in political accounts of institutions because mainstream comparative research in this area tends to analyse formal rules. Some of the complexities of conducting linguistic ethnographic work in institutions are: gaining access to research sites; researching powerful, elite participants and the viability of using the the readily available Official Reports as data. The ethnographic approach including ethnographic interviews and observations in situ in different parliaments, is combined with applied Conversation Analysis (CA). Gaining the floor has been viewed by analysts as a competitive economy and this is particularly apt for the highly regulated debate floor where turns are sought for professional and political gain. I also explain how Critical Discourse Analysis is used to assist the identification of gendered discourses relating to gendered linguistic stereotypes.