The Politics of Institutional Ethnography: Representation, Reflexivity, and Method

This session will focus on the politics of Institutional Ethnography, specifically how researchers do knowledge production and navigate their positionality vis-à-vis participants, texts, and topics. This session is open to any researchers doing Institutional Ethnography, critiquing Institutional Ethnography, using the work of Dorothy Smith to inform their research practice, or mixing Institutional Ethnography with other approaches. This session will focus on Institutional Ethnography-related research that thinks about what it means to do sociology for people, including the politics of representation, power dynamics with participants, activist or political research, the specific methods of doing research with attention to reflexivity, accountability and ethics, and the complexity of researcher positionality vis-à-vis research topics, participants, and readers. We invite researchers who are thinking about Institutional Ethnography as a feminist approach, how to navigate intersecting inequalities, the coloniality of texts, decolonial critiques and methodologies, Indigenous methodologies, and abolitionist approaches to institutions.