Using Institutional Ethnography to Understand Justice and Power

Dorothy Smith developed IE as a feminist research strategy to interrogate how people’s everyday worlds become caught up in institutional processes, focussing on the organising power of language and texts (Smith, 2005). This session invites paper submissions pertaining to the ontology of institutional ethnography, and it will showcase a diversity of institutional ethnographic research exploring relations of coordination and control in different institutional sites. Researchers investigate specific modes of knowledge deployed by people to coordinate their activities in any field of action.

For instance, papers in this session may address misconduct at the workplace drawing attention to abuse within various institutional settings. This session is concerned with exploring how Institutional Ethnography (IE) can be used to interrogate the enduring harm caused by sexual and racial harassment across a range of institutions (politics, education, social work etc). IE’s textual focus allows researchers to examine how institutional texts and processes organise individual experiences of institutional forms of redress such as complaint systems, connecting these to wider discourses on misconduct, justice, and power.

This session brings together scholarship from across disciplines to examine the potentiality of IE for interrogating ongoing institutional injustices. We welcome theoretical, empirical, and exploratory or reflective papers.