Institutional Ethnography: A Participatory, Collaborative Reflection

Institutional Ethnography is uniquely positioned to explore this year’s conference theme: Knowing Justice in the Anthropocene. Launching from a single human standpoint and reaching into the local and trans-local through human-created texts and text-driven sequences of work, we are subject to our own creations and doings. These creations (texts) and doings (work) can be lost in the web of the social, in the taken-for-granted organizing of our lives. We, as graduate student research participants and our Faculty PI, are from various socio-cultural backgrounds. We collaborate to explicate this web of graduate student enrollment and retention at our research institution of higher education.

This paper aims to explore our participation and collaboration through our individual standpoint reflections on the process of working together to create an understanding of what hinders and helps us succeed, no matter our educational background. The reflexivity of this institutional ethnography research project informs our map of graduate students' social relations. Our individual lived experiences serve as our cartographer’s tools. As we reveal the map together, we aim to explore graduate enrollment and retention in our community as we seek to illuminate the institutional shadows that may be concealing hegemony and injustice. We aim to bring these issues into the light to explicate and alleviate and to know how a more equitable institution may be created. Institutional ethnography helps to level the field, creating a more just world through human-created text (research findings). We cannot escape the Anthropocene, we are of it. We hope to add to the betterment of this epoch. This is our praxis.