Institutional Ethnography in Educational Settings

Institutional ethnography is a sociological mode of inquiry, developed by Dorothy Smith to elucidate how social relations are organized to produce the patterns and configurations of social life. In Institutional ethnography, the social or social relations are not theorized but rather understood as actual material relations among people. Departing from people’s experiences from a particular standpoint, an institutional ethnographic inquiry involves using people’s everyday experiences as entry points for empirical investigations of the ruling relations that coordinate how people relate to one another and their surroundings.

This session seeks to highlight research that is informed by the ontology of Institutional Ethnography as applied to educational settings, including but not restricted to: illuminating the intersecting institutional and policy relations, which shape the distribution of resources and opportunities (e.g. across race, class and gender lines). The session invites papers which trace from ethnographic descriptions of people’s experiences in diverging educational and higher educational contexts, from a range of possible standpoints within the educational contexts. The session could include work that elucidates institutional sequences of action, or identifies the ruling relations shaping the everyday realities of people in their local settings. Of particular interest is the interplay between people’s diverse experiences and the textually-mediated institutional relations shaping the delivery and management of education and research.