1 Proliferating Presences: Ethnographic Subjectivity in a Distributed Educational Research Consortium Paper Presented at : The Annual Meeting of The American Anthropological Association San Francisco November 1996 Mizuko Ito mito@itofisher.com Stanford University and The Institute for Research on Learning For the past two and a half years, I've been a graduate student, fieldworker, research assistant, and project manager with an educational reform project that spans over 25 different community, educational, and research institutions. These institutions are scattered around the US, as well as in Mexico, Russia, Australia, and Israel, and involve countless children and community members, as well as 14 Principal Investigators (PIs) and a steady stream of administrative, undergraduate, and graduate research support. The bulk of communication between project nodes is conducted over email, with the addition of yearly consortium-wide meetings, and frequent travel of individual consortium members. This multi-million dollar project, funded by the Mellon and Russell Sage Foundations, and led by Mike Cole at the University of California, San Diego, involves the establishment, administration, sustaining of, and research on a network of afterschool clubs where children work with undergraduate tutors on computer-based educational activities. In contrast to other pieces of the project that focus on site development, community relations, or psychological testing, the charter for my team's piece in the broader consortium is to conduct an ethnographic evaluation of the workings of the clubs, examining children's learning, as well as the institutional dynamics of the research and implementation effort. My team includes 4 faculty members, 2 other graduate students, a multiplicity of audio-visual and networked computer equipment, and 3 or more