XIX ISA World Congress of Sociology (July 15-21, 2018)

998

IE and Other Concepts: Configuring Apparatus for Inquiry

TG06 Institutional Ethnography (host committee)

Language: English

Institutional Ethnography, as a method of inquiry, can attune the agent or ethnographer to a range of social relations in ways that reveal the materiality of how people’s work and lives are governed. Institutional ethnographers inquire into the ‘how’ of the ruling relations in order to make changes. They may also engage appreciatively and critically with other analytical approaches, or ways of making meaning. Phenomena may emerge and be made visible through certain configurations of institutional ethnography with other analytical approaches. An intra-action between IE and other meaning making processes may assist the ethnographer to learn from these approaches, contribute to them and, where necessary, to articulate differences between them and IE.

 

This session seeks to explore how institutional ethnographers have experienced putting IE to work in configurations with other concepts, and to discuss what phenomena have emerged as a result of such configurations. It seeks to shed light on questions such as: What can IE contribute to or learn from these other conceptual ideas? How do such configurations enable and extend what can be understood?  What is the nature of the intra-action that allows the phenomena to emerge? What are the similarities and differences between IE and these other concepts? Can an engagement with other analytical approaches be achieved with the necessary rigour and ontological consistency that IE demands?