Institutional Ethnography, Activism, and Social Change


Eric Mykhalovskiy, York University

This paper explores questions and assumptions about the relationship between social transformation and the forms of knowledge about institutional relations made possible by institutional ethnography (IE). While the use of research for progressive social change and the political commitments of inquiry are key dimensions of IE, they have not been the subject of sustained or focused discussion beyond general accounts of practices that center experience as a point of departure for inquiry and the need to counter objectified forms of knowing upon which contemporary forms of ruling rely.  This paper poses questions about assumptions about institutional ethnographic inquiry and social change. It emphasizes multiple traditions within institutional ethnography that express a relation between knowledge, knower, object of inquiry and change including community-engaged research, institutional “tinkering,” and political activist ethnography. The paper asks whether these traditions expresse a modernist logic of knowledge through which the researcher “makes the unknown known”, whether IE is limited to a reformist politics, and how IE might relate to a radical or utopian ethic of social transformation. 

This paper will be presented at the following session: