Making the work of people visible in housing

This paper examines the process by which my colleague, Paul Luken, and I carried out an investigation of the transformation of housing over the 20^th century in the United States using institutional ethnography as our model of inquiry. We discuss our interviewing strategies, techniques for locating texts, and analytical strategies given the historical nature of our research. As a pedagogical exercise, this exploration opens up some of the challenges we faced in moving our analysis beyond the local organization to the extra-local organization of the institution of housing.