(CAD1b) Institutional Ethnography and Critical Sociology in Canada: Challenging Hate and Sustaining Shared Futures

This session features novel work from critical scholars who employ Canadian feminist sociologist Dorothy Smith’s approach to studies in the social organization of knowledge, known as institutional ethnography (IE). IE’s focus on exploring and critiquing ruling relations that organize contemporary capitalist societies offers a particular contribution to scholarship and activism committed to creating equitable futures. Scholars working with IE have created a trajectory of research that critically interrogates social relations that shape inequities across health care, education, and the social service sector. More recently, scholars have developed creative applications of IE in studies that traverse such settings as digital online spaces, urban landscapes, and the criminal legal system. This panel features papers that reflect on how IE can contribute to broad efforts to challenge hate and sustain shared futures through discussions of examples of institutional ethnographic projects and/or through methodological reflections on the core features of institutional ethnography. Tags: Canadian Sociology, Hate

Organizers: Colin Hastings, University of Waterloo, Eric Mykhalovskiy, York University; Chairs: Eric Mykhalovskiy, York University, Colin Hastings, University of Waterloo

Presentations

Kevin Bonnell, University of Waterloo

Exploring Resistance, Negotiation, and Compliance: Tenant Experiences During the Eviction Process in the Greater Toronto Area

This presentation explores a critical aspect of tenant experiences during the eviction process, focusing on the nuanced dynamics of compliance, negotiation, and resistance. Drawing from Dorothy Smiths institutional ethnography (IE) approach, this research contributes to the broader scholarship on the social organization of knowledge and its relevance to housing justice. In a contemporary capitalist society where housing instability and precarity are deeply historical and systemic issues, understanding the strategies employed by tenants and tenant organizations becomes essential. Through a comprehensive analysis of narratives, this presentation sheds light on the diverse ways in which individuals navigate the complex terrain of eviction, offering valuable insights into the potential for organized and everyday resistance efforts to address systemic drivers of evictions. The first objective of this presentation is to elucidate the organized and everyday resistance efforts employed by tenants facing eviction. By delving into the narratives of tenants, this research uncovers the multifaceted strategies employed to resist eviction and maintain secure housing. From organized tenant associations to individual acts of defiance, this study seeks to unveil the spectrum of resistance tactics that tenants employ. Understanding the various forms of resistance, negotiation, and compliance is crucial not only for providing tenants with tools to safeguard their housing but also for informing broader housing justice efforts. The second objective of this presentation is to examine the role of planning in learning from these resistance efforts and conceptualizing housing justice solutions that address the systemic drivers of evictions. Planning is pivotal in shaping urban landscapes and housing policies, making it a critical arena for advocating for housing justice. By analyzing how planning professionals engage with tenant resistance narratives, this research explores the potential for integrating tenant perspectives into urban planning practices. It seeks to answer questions such as how planning can be informed by tenant experiences and how it can contribute to systemic change that mitigates the root causes of eviction. The narratives presented in this presentation reflect the lived experiences of tenants who have grappled with eviction threats, legal processes, and housing insecurity. They reveal the complex interplay between tenants, landlords, legal systems, and advocacy groups, highlighting the diverse strategies employed to negotiate, resist, or inadvertently comply with eviction orders. These narratives underscore the need for urban sociology and urban planning to comprehensively understand tenant experiences in the eviction process and emphasize the importance of addressing housing justice beyond mere legal compliance. Through an institutional ethnographic-informed approach, this study uncovers patterns and themes within tenant narratives, offering valuable insights into the challenges and successes of those who have navigated the eviction process. It highlights the potential for organized resistance efforts, tenant advocacy, and tenant-landlord negotiations to challenge the status quo and contribute to equitable housing solutions. This presentation is a crucial contribution to urban sociology and urban planning, offering fresh perspectives on reimagining housing justice. By shedding light on the intricate experiences of tenants grappling with eviction, it responds to the urgent need for research that aligns with Dorothy Smiths IE approach, allowing us to critically examine the social and ruling relations that underlie housing inequalities. Through a deep exploration of various strategies encompassing compliance, negotiation, and resistance, this research not only enriches our understanding but also provides a foundation upon which urban planning practices can be re-envisioned. By incorporating tenant narratives and their invaluable insights, we have the potential to reshape our approaches to housing justice. These insights enable us to challenge the deep-seated systemic and historical disparities within contemporary capitalist societies and pave the way for radical collective futures.

Neela Hassan, University Of Waterloo

Institutional Ethnography as a Research Methodology to Study Domestic Violence Experiences of Migrant Women: Some Concerns and Comments

Dorothy Smith developed institutional ethnography (IE) as an approach to knowing the social that is useful for people and contributes to the understanding of oppressive and dominating practices that shape peoples everyday lives. Smith designed IE as a method of inquiry to create an alternative to the traditional research methods that do not subordinate peoples knowing and experiences to objectified forms of knowledge and discourses. In this paper, I discuss the possibilities and challenges of employing IE in a project that analyzes the accounts of migrant women who have experiences of domestic violence. I argue that while IE addresses many limitations of the mainstream sociological methods by making the ontological shift that starts from the standpoint of peoples everyday experiences, it presents methodological challenges and ethical dilemmas. I contend that understanding social phenomena with all its nuances and complexities requires pushing methodological boundaries and engaging with messy processes. This practice becomes even more important in contexts where the research subjects experience multiple forms of marginalization, violence, and exclusion. As a research methodology, IE enables my research to examine the intersection of multi-layered forms of precarities that exacerbate womens vulnerability to domestic violence by tracing the extra-local forces, such as the policies and practices of governmental and non-governmental organizations. It will shed light on the structural barriers that individual women encounter when accessing necessary services in their pursuit of safety, as well as identify strengths and gaps in institutional policies and practices designed to support migrant women. In doing so, it not only produces knowledge but also offers direct benefits to research informants by locating them as experts of their own lived actualities in research, helping them to see where they are located in the system and what and how they can change the parts of the system that dont work for them. However, utilizing IE as a research method for studying vulnerable groups, particularly those whose experiences are deeply intertwined with cultural beliefs and local relationships, presents the risk of suppressing individuals understanding and interpretations of their experiences. Additionally, it may neglect factors that may not be directly linked to broader social institutions but are equally crucial in comprehending peoples experiences. In the specific context of my research, an overemphasis on text-mediated relations may result in misrepresenting and misunderstanding research informants and their experiences, potentially leading to what Bourdieu refers to as "symbolic violence." To overcome these two challenges, I constructed my research methodology based on my research projects theoretical and methodological grounding by incorporating IE with a narrative approach. In doing so, my aim is to uncover how the extra-local and text-mediated processes coordinate migrant womens experiences of domestic violence without overlooking the local culture and beliefs that may not have traces in institutions and texts but are significant in shaping womens experiences. It will enable the analysis to highlight the complexity, ambiguity, and contradictions of relations between women and the world, including the past, present, and their social and ideological understanding of themselves and the world around them.

Mitchell McLarnon, Concordia University

Investigating the social relations of community gardening for adult education

This paper presentation describes and analyzes the social relations that emerged from four separate adult education internships/community-based garden projects in Tio’tia:ke/Montreal. Methodologically and epistemologically, I combine institutional ethnography (IE; Smith, 2005) and visual methodologies (Mitchell, 2011) to explore and uncover how adult education internships in community gardens, gardening programming and greening can work to produce disproportionate outcomes for adult learners, educators, community workers and community members. Drawing on a range of datasets including IE interviews, fieldnotes, photographs, and textual and policy analyses, I trace from people’s experiential knowledge of attempting to use gardens for social (employment, food security), environmental (pollination, greening for reducing the urban heat island effect, etc.) and educational reasons – into local policy and texts that shape garden and adult education possibilities in urban contexts. In the process of creating and funding adult education internships and many different gardens in community organizations and gentrifying neighbourhoods, I have elucidated specific institutional contrivances (e.g., funding, policy, geographies of injustice, work processes, discourse, curricular) that are presently structuring and defining who experiences access to gardens, gardening and its ostensible health and wellbeing benefits, greenspaces, and environmental learning. Starting in the actual material sites where gardening and adult education take place (a university campus, community organizations, greenspaces, local neighbourhoods, and so on), my findings on the educational, environmental, institutional, historical, geographic and political-economic relations suggest that while adult education gardening programs have the potential for community-based learning, increased wellbeing, and ecological awareness, the use of gardens in adult education needs to be highly contextualized within critical discussions related to settler-colonialism, neoliberalism, the history and politics of land and water use, (green) gentrification, and land access and its growing criminalization. My reflexive findings add to adult education scholarship on cities and food insecurity (Sumner, 2021); however, I complicate and deromanticize the notion that community gardening can address food insecurity and can contribute to wellbeing for all. In this historical moment of climate emergency, people living, working, learning, and gardening in cities need to see how environmental sustainability efforts and policies produce differential effects at the level of a large and diverse urban population. This work advances adult education scholarship within IE and feminist historical materialism (Smith, 2005; Bannerji, 2020). My discussion encircles policy and governance issues that require further research in the context of adult environmental education (especially in this historical moment of climate emergency) such as urban human displacement, neoliberal garden funding, limited sustainability discourses, healthcare, safety, transportation, and housing.

Naomi Nichols, Trent University

Institutional Ethnography, Theory, and Social Action

Many scholars who take up Dorothy Smith’s approach to studies in the social organization of knowledge (often described as institutional ethnography or IE) do so as a means of challenging discrimination and hate, while simultaneously engaging in collective efforts to create new social and political futures (for Canadian examples, see the work of Colin Hastings, Gary Kinsman, Jayne Malenfant, Alexander McLelland, Eric Mykhalovskiy, Susan Turner, and George Smith). IE was designed to ensure sociology is used in service of people outside the academy – particularly those engaged in movement organizing, collective struggle, and solidarity building. But in seeking to create a sociology that is useful to people, Smith conceived of a different engagement with theory and theoretically derived concepts than her contemporaries. While it remains the case that theory elaboration and creation are central aims of much sociological work, Smith encouraged institutional ethnographers to eschew these ordinary epistemic practices. This does not mean an IE’s analytic aims are strictly descriptive nor that IE is atheoretical; rather, instead of using theory to explain social life, institutional ethnographers use theory to bring certain aspects of social life into view and to orient in particular ways to the social and institutional relations that comprise the focus of inquiry. These theoretical practices are often misunderstood by people familiar with other sociological traditions and by emerging IE scholars. In this presentation, I will describe several ways theory is used and remains useful to IE and seek to clarify Dorothy Smith’s reticence, regarding the standard theoretical engagements of her sociological colleagues. The arguments put forward in this talk are first anchored in a close reading of Smith’s own work, as well as personal communications with her. I draw heavily on her engagements with Karl Marx’s work – especially her reading of the German Ideology . Smith’s early scholarship can be read as a critique of sociology and the sociological practices of her (largely white, straight) male mentors and colleagues that comprised the field of sociological research in North America at the time of her early writings (e.g., Smith, 1984; 1987; 1990a; 1990b). Aspects of her critique reflect a re-engagement with Marx’s work, after finding that her own sociological training did not allow her to explain the problems that she experienced in her own life nor those that ordinary people brought to her as a specialist in organizational theory at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. As Smith shared with me during a conversation in 2016, she took what she "had come to understand as Marx’s critiques … essentially of the separation of the concepts from the actualities that they may reflect or originate in. Then the treatment as if the concepts themselves were the determinants in the social process and in the society. I thought that was exactly what sociology was doing, and I thought that you have to find something else to do." The “something else” Smith decided to do was conduct scholarship that revealed and interrogated conceptual practices of power – including the development and use of social theory as a strategy for knowing and ruling social life. But in doing so, she would remain engaged with an extraordinary range of interdisciplinary theories across her career and would, herself, put forward several orienting concepts – such as work, standpoint, and ruling relations (for example). These concepts are not used to name or explain social relations; rather, they serve as heuristics to be used in the field and when one moves from field-based observations and interviews into analytic practices (whether alone in the office or with those for whom findings are hoped to be most pertinent). In IE, analysis seeks to explain how the problems people have experienced and the struggles they face are shaped by institutional, social, and political-economic relations that transcend individual experience and hook us into complexes of social coordination through which societies function. These explanations tend to be ethnographic, rather than theoretical in nature, but they are no less generalizable in this regard; the objects of inquiry are the generalized and generalizing institutional and political-economic relations that also comprise targets for social and political action. In the proposed presentation, I will move from a careful engagement with Smith’s work into an examination of my own use of theory in IE across more than a decade of community-based and participatory research. As I do so, I point to the work of other IE scholars that provided me a model for how to conduct theoretically engaged IE without falling back on the ideological practices that Smith problematizes. In the end, I argue that continued engagement with sociological (and other disciplinary) concepts and theories is essential to the production and evolution of IE scholarship, and we need to do a better job of ensuring those who are new to IE understand how to fruitfully engage with theory in their work, while maintaining a commitment to IE’s ontological, epistemic, and ethical ideals.

Rashmee Karnad-Jani, Public Scholar

Talk, Texts and Trajectories: How the Blended Standpoint Helps Create and Sustain Shared Futures in K-12 Education

In Texts, Facts and Femininity, Smith (1993) explicates there are two lines of inquiry that run parallel to one another and create an impression that they will never meet. The first leads into what it means to explore the social from women’s experience by beginning with an embodied subject who experiences what is going on. The second leads into the social organization of knowledge that is objectified and carries within it the constituents of ruling relations of contemporary capitalism. This paper begins at the intersection of these two lines of inquiry wherein the Blended Standpoint of Mother and Teacher examines the disjuncture between the textual promise of educational policy and the actual experiences of people in Ontario’s schooling spaces. It brings into view the mothering work undertaken by women who are Ontario Certified Teachers (OCTs) as practising educators in a variety of roles in the educational sector, and their counterparts who are not teachers – for the educational outcomes of their children. By sharing the data from two studies conducted as institutional ethnographies through multilingual in-depth interviews in 2013 and 2019, this paper highlights the social organization of knowledge and social relations of women as they engage with the mass education system in Ontario. This paper explicates how although largely unnamed, the K-12 educational landscape in Ontario, especially the family-school interaction is textually coordinated. Instead of considering textual materials merely as sources of information, the inertia of texts is questioned by taking up Smith’s explication of The Active Text to examine the social relations within mothering work for schooling. By taking up at least three key concepts from Smith’s scholarship in the field namely standpoint, the problematic and ruling relations, this paper brings into view the ways in which intentional partnerships between teachers and mothers of their students can becomes sites for social change to create and sustain shared futures for all children. This paper also builds from Smith’s notion of The Small Hero and explicates how everyday talk in schools enters institutional texts and determines the trajectories for students and their families through the interlocking of multiple factors that form part of the Standard North American Family as an ideological code pervasively present in social professional and educational spaces.