Researchers and practitioners who care about education for an inclusive and socially just world understand that empirical work around benefit and outcomes of schooling for students in marginalised positions requires committed and sustained partnership. Ethnography places the researcher in the midst of the ‘social’ enterprise of the research context (Delamont, 2007) in messy, entangled ways that not only affect the people, places and practices of the site, but they themselves become affected. This symposium features three “Multi-cities Ethnographies” projects drawn from a larger, 8 city project across the United Kingdom and Australia which are a consequence of sustained engagement and collaborative inquiry in schools and communities for which a focus upon equity and social justice in schooling can have most impact on the lives of students. The three projects are drawn from Scotland in the United Kingdom and Australia, specifically the states of Queensland and New South Wales, in urban, low socio-economic areas. The focus on pedagogic rights and pedagogic discourses and practices across these ethnographic projects illuminate the centrality of ethnographic reflexivity (Exley, Whatman & Singh, 2018) and the key translation points of the research for practitioners with a personal, professional and political commitment to social justice. The first paper presents some rich, early theoretical discussions in developing an Edinburgh-based ethnographic case study and traverses an academic terrain that should deliver ideas that will allow for re-thinking poverty, class and schooling in this era of data-driven accountability. The second paper demonstrates how school-community-university partnership in ethnographic research requires methodologies to be revisited, re-thought and re-designed over time, particularly to realise community democratic stake in education and pedagogical rights of students. The third paper shares fine-grained analysis and insights from a primary school based project enabling students from low socio-economic areas to perceive themselves as learners through pedagogies of engagement and transformation.