Research Seminar: Change from the inside? Institutional ethnography as a research strategy for transforming institutions

Event details

A Canadian-based research strategy called institutional ethnography (IE) has made inroads into qualitative research curricula across different countries and study fields. Known for its radical approach to knowledge production and its social ontology, IE emerged from its founding scholars’ active participation in feminist and gay liberation movements. Drawing on my research in law and mental health, I will explore the possibilities of IE for facilitating institutional change by focusing specifically on its investigation of front-line practices as sites of domination enacted according to organizations’ interests and priorities, resulting in displacement or silencing of the needs of service users. At the beginning of my talk, I will introduce IE. Then, I will identify specific tools and strategies, such as text-reader conversation, institutional mapping, and a general approach to work that institutional ethnographers use to investigate how what people do is socially organized and coordinated by institutional settings and broader ruling relations. Importantly, focusing on the actual helps avoid speculative explanations of organizational malfunctioning; when directed at agencies, the proposal for change must be grounded in a detailed understanding of how agencies operate. Lastly, I will provide another two examples of how researchers use IE for mapping space for institutional change; the first is political activist ethnography (PAE), which aims to produce valuable knowledge for social movements and activists, and the second is a meta-ethnography where researchers bring IE studies into conversation with each other to gain broader insights than each study could generate alone.