Twelve Sessions Hosted by the Thematic Group on Institutional Ethnography XIX ISA WORLD CONGRESS ON SOCIOLOGY Toronto, Canada July 15-21, 1918 1. Bodies and Places in Institutional Ethnography Institutional ethnographers work with an explicit social ontology that begins from the recognition that [i]ndividuals are there; they are in their bodies; they are active; and what they re doing is coordinated with the doings of others (Dorothy Smith, 2005, p. 59) A central goal of institutional ethnography is to discover the ways that people s activities are coordinated (often in extended, translocal relations) such that their experience happens as it does. Over the years much institutional ethnographic analysis has focused on conceptual modes of coordination and forms of rule vested in texts, which are powerful organizers in contemporary society and highly consequential for what happens to human bodies and the places where we find ourselves. However, some institutional ethnographic research has made the corporeal and physical aspects of institutional coordination and everyday life a particular focus of analysis. Often this research involves observational forms of inquiry or interviews and personal reflections exploring embodied and sensory practices. In recent years there has been a call to include bodies and places in sociological analysis. What contributions can/does institutional ethnography make to this project of bringing bodies into sociological view? What are distinctly institutional ethnographic ways of doing this? This session invites papers that report on institutional ethnographic research which brings a particular focus to embodied, emplaced practices and experiences -- or that consider these questions from analytical or methodological perspectives. Session Organizer: Liza MCCOY, University of Calgary, Canada 2. Gender Studies from the Perspective of Institutional Ethnography / Los Estudios De Género Desde La Perspectiva De La Etnografía Institucional Language: Spanish and English This session calls for IE papers studying how each person perceives him/herself in relation to their assigned gender. This indicator as a classifier of people, challenges the State, private companies and societal organizations, for their daily use in religious institutions, government personal records; health, education, sports and prison services; national states' security and defense bodies; State powers, among others. The session focuses also in the place assigned to women in society and in the work world, as well
as the oppression and violence that they often suffer. From a wide and multifocal perspective, we welcome studies focusing on the potential of Institutional Ethnography to analyze these topics. Esta sesión convoca a EI que investiguen la percepción de cada individuo respecto a su género. Este indicador en tanto clasificador de las personas, interpela al Estado, a las empresas privadas y a las organizaciones de la sociedad civil por su uso cotidiano en instituciones religiosas; organismos vinculados a registros de las personas; sistemas de salud, educación, deportes, carcelario; organismos de seguridad y defensa; poderes estatales; entre otros. La sesión también se interesa por otro aspecto de la problemática: el lugar asignado a la mujer en la sociedad y en el mundo laboral, así como por el sometimiento y la violencia que muchas de ellas padecen. Desde una perspectiva amplia y multifocal, son bienvenidos los trabajos que analicen aspectos de la temática desde las EI. Session Organizer: Laura FERRENO, Universidad Nacional de Avellaneda, Argentina, 3. IE and Other Concepts: Configuring Apparatus for Inquiry 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? Session Organizer: Debra TALBOT, University of Sydney, Australia 4. IE for People Perceived to Have Cognitive Weaknesses or Psychological Challenges Language: French and English People with cognitive weaknesses related to mental illness, dementia, traumatic brain injuries, and delayed cognitive development represents some special challenges for the IE. How to get a valid understanding of their life-world when they have difficulties expressing themselves, narratives, memory, the conception of the context and their relation to institutions and social services? The discussion
focuses on doing IE for these and similar vulnerable groups which are for some reasons regarded as being unable to take care of their own situation. Papers on methodological issues as well as substantial results from empirical research on relations, institutional structures and discourses are most welcome. Session Organizer: Kjeld HOGSBRO, Aalborg University, Department of Sociology and Social Work, Denmark, Denmark 5. Institutional Ethnographies of Global Development: Knowledge, Experience and Ruling Relations In the contemporary world, aid to less-developed countries has become increasingly organized and coordinated through high-profile, often science-based, programs whose ruling relations cross institutional, national and professional boundaries. Institutional ethnography proposes that programs of improvement in areas as diverse as healthcare, education, women s rights, humanitarian relief, and agriculture and food production are constituted through textual technologies that make agenda-setting, management decision-making and accountability for desired results a matter of calculation based on the application and use of standardized metrics. Texts such as international declarations, global assessment systems and universal indicators introduce ruling ideas (and associated best practices) into local contexts. While local experiences of participation are mixed, virtually unassailable accounts of the planned outcomes of these kinds of institutionally programmed activity are integral to the technology. Institutional ethnographies explicating these knowledge-based processes as ruling practices would be welcome contributions to this session, as well as papers that chronicle the troubles experienced in the process of such programs being activated in the lives of people in local settings. Together, the session s papers are expected to extend understandings of what happens within these well-intended knowledge circuits and to begin to identify the empirical grounds from which social activists might contest their power and authority. Session Organizers: Marie CAMPBELL, University of Victoria, Canada, and Ann Christin NILSEN, University of Agder, Norway 6. Institutional Ethnography as Youth-Attuned Rendering: Human Rights in the Americas Language: Spanish and English How are human rights socially organized within institutions that are meant to uphold wellbeing and empowerment with/for youth? Which forms of oppression and violence continue to exist for young people within education and welfare/protection systems and practices? How is digital and social media being used or abused to this end? This session calls together academics, practitioners and youth who are employing institutional ethnography to examine workings of the institutional systems for the rights of youth, including young immigrants and refugees. This session invokes human rights as rendered with/for/by youth and beginning in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. It invites
interdisciplinary discussions to detail how human rights animate and activate young lives. Papers will detail how Institutional Ethnography is used in a range of youth-attuned and de-colonizing methods to address a wide range of questions relating to power, violence and justice as themes of the 2018 International Sociological Association. Session Organizers: Kate TILLECZEK, University of Prince Edward Island, Canada, and Henry PARADA, Ryerson University, Canada 7. Institutional Ethnography: Exploring Changes in Public Education This session seeks papers incorporating Institutional Ethnography research that explore education from early childhood and primary grades to secondary school to adult education to college and university. Papers selected for this session will be based on research that reveals the ways in which changes in publicly-funded education in local, national and global contexts are impacting students, educators, families, communities and others in education-related fields. The session is designed to illustrate how Institutional Ethnography can show not only how those changes are happening, but also how they reshape policies and practices that address issues of access, equity, and equal opportunity in education. Session Organizer: Lois ANDRE-BECHELY, California State University, Los Angeles, USA 8. International Responses to Institutional Ethnography: How Has IE Developed in Different Contexts? The purpose of this session is to raise awareness and broaden the academic debate through engagement with multiple international interpretations, responses and developments of IE, methodologically as well as theoretically. Institutional ethnography, as a school of thought, emerged in North America and has been particularly influenced by scholars from Canada and USA. Gradually it has spread across the world, and has been recognized as an important contribution to social sciences in e.g. Australia, South-America, Taiwan, Scandinavia and other European countries. Yet, the majority of the boss texts of IE (e.g. books and journal articles that are frequently cited) remain to be of North American authorship. When IE develops in contexts in which the legacy of social inquiry, as well as the institutional order, have their own distinct characteristics, new methodological issues arise, and the context of debate and justification differs. What characterizes IE and the contribution of IE in such diverse contexts? How is IE justified? How does IE fit into the theoretical and methodological landscape of social scientific research? Which topics do IE-researchers in these diverse contexts address, and how do they go about in their research? In this session we welcome both theoretical and empirical papers from scholars across the world to deal with such questions. Session Organizers: Rebecca LUND, Aarhus University, Denmark, and Ann Christin NILSEN, University of Agder, Norway
9. Responsibilisation, Accountability and Assessment Practices in Systems, Institutions and Homes Frontline work in a range of systems, institutions and in homes continues to be redefined as new accountability demands are enacted. From healthcare institutions to childcare centers and schools, workers are increasingly being required to take personal responsibility for themselves as workers, parents, citizens; as well as taking responsibility for their children, their students, patients and so on. Success is constituted by accountability regimes, and provides a mechanism for institutions and systems to steer from a distance. Thus, frontline workers are asked not only to account for their performance, but also to take responsibility for ongoing cycles of improvement. These practices not only affect the lives of workers, but also that of their students, patients, customers, families etc. This session invites papers which examine practices that regulate and coordinate work within a context of increasing assessment, accountability and responsibilisation. Session Organizer: Nerida SPINA, Queensland University of Technology, Australia 10. Social Justice, Activism, and Institutional Ethnography Since George Smith s 1990 seminal article in Social Problems on Political Activism as Ethnographer, those using institutional ethnography have worked with communities to address justice issues. Ellen Pence s efforts on behalf of women and children in domestic violence cases best exemplifies this kind of community engagement work and IE s potential for locating institutional sites of change accessible to those working for justice. Others such as Marie Campbell (people with disabilities and women in development), Eric Mykhalovskiy (criminalization of HIV non-disclosure) and Susan Turner (community planning and women and rural development) among many others have begun to extend institutional ethnography as a skill activist can use to undercover the invisible forms of ruling organizing local communities. This session welcomes all community engaged, activist work using institutional ethnography. Session Organizer: Suzanne VAUGHAN, Arizona State University, USA 11. The Ruling Relations of Normalcy : Exploring Puzzles of Disability, Illness, and Aging and French Institutional ethnographies begin from problems and puzzles of everyday life. This session is devoted to IE studies that explore the puzzles of those whose lives or bodies may not fit the regimes organized for those defined as normal. Papers will address the lived experiences of disability, illness, or aging; the
operation of facilities and agencies that provide supports and services; the work of advocacy and inclusion; or related topics. Session Organizer: Marjorie DEVAULT, Syracuse University, USA 12. The Social Organization of Knowledge Institutional ethnography (IE) investigations of the social organization of knowledge, regardless of their topical concerns, as well as theoretical discussions of institutional ethnography s approach to the study of ideology, will be presented at this session. Institutional ethnography includes a focus on ideological practice or, more specifically, ideology as practice. IE investigations discover how ideology operates in specific settings, how it shapes work practices, how it is incorporated in particular social relations, and how it produces actual consequences in people s everyday lives. These investigations differ from other studies in the sociology of knowledge in many respects, but it is the requirement that the point of departure for research be the experiences of particular people and the conditions under which they work that fundamentally separates this sociology of knowledge from other prominent theoretical approaches. It is from this standpoint in the everyday world, which includes the sociologist, that knowledge is explored as it is socially organized. Furthermore, the aim of institutional ethnography, as Smith has asserted, is to reorganize the social relations of knowledge of the social so that people can take up knowledge as an extension of our ordinary knowledge of the local actualities of our lives. Papers addressing these concerns are welcome. Session Organizer: Paul LUKEN, University of West Georgia, USA