The ghosts behind my chair: reflections on the fieldwork at St Luke's

Delamont, Sara ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5683-2311 2026. The ghosts behind my chair: reflections on the fieldwork at St Luke's. Whitaker, Emilie Morwenna and Atkinson, Paul, eds. Ethnography’s ghosts: spectres, archives, ancestors, Routledge, pp. 114-122. (10.4324/9781003541424-11)

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Abstract

Doctoral ethnographic fieldwork in an elite girls’ school was an apprenticeship in ethnography and a revelation about what elite academic education for women was like. The ghosts of the nineteenth-century pioneers of that school – St Luke's – and of Girton College, Cambridge have haunted the author's life and work ever since 1969. The central theme is parallel to the three ghosts in A Christmas Carol: the pioneers of the nineteenth century are the ‘ghosts’ of education past, the fieldwork for the PhD is the ‘ghost’ of education present, and the insights gained are the equivalent of the ‘ghosts’ of the career yet to come. The chapter explores the futures opened up by the research, into the history of elite women's education, into symbolic interactionism, and into ethnography itself. The central concept developed to understand the history of women's education – double conformity – still has explanatory power in 2025. Two other sets of ghosts – women symbolic interactionists and the African-Brazilians who created modern capoeira – are also briefly discussed because, while their centrality to my career was not known when I sat in St Luke's, the women who founded the school would pass me on to those other two sets.

Item Type:	Book Section
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Social Sciences (Includes Criminology and Education)
Publisher:	Routledge
ISBN:	9781032891491
Last Modified:	13 Jul 2026 14:46
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/188177

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