IE NEWSLETTER Institutional Ethnography Division of the Society for the Study of Social Problems Fall 2013 Vol. 10, No. 3 Lauren Eastwood Division Chair State University of New York College at Plattsburgh lauren.eastwood@plattsburgh.edu Send correspondence to: Cheryl Zurawski Correspondence and Copy Editor cdz@arialassociates.com Send photos and other images to: Gina Petonito Production and Picture Editor petonig@muohio.edu Lindsay Kerr Proofreader and Editor lindsay.kerr@utoronto.ca On the inside -2013 award recipients -Calls for papers, abstracts and nominations -Member news, notes and publications -The line-up for San Francisco From the Division Chair Lauren Eastwood Greetings! It is an exciting time to be involved with SSSP as we come off the most highly attended meeting in the society’s history this past August in New York City. It is hard for me to believe that the Institutional Ethnography Division (IE Division) has existed for a decade now. In that time, we have built a robust, vibrant, and exciting division. We have seen exciting new work being done by graduate students, attracted new members, and fostered old connections. It has been a great success. We have a lot to look forward to, including what promises to be a stimulating experience at the 2014 SSSP in San Francisco (for an early look at the session line-up, please see pages 7-8). As we move into our second decade as a division, I’d like to encourage us to celebrate our accomplishments, but not to rest on our laurels. Perhaps our first decade was based on institutionalizing ourselves within SSSP, however, moving forward we could think about how to grow our division and maintain its vibrancy. Making connections with other scholars and recruiting new division members should be high on our list of priorities, as we have a lot to contribute to how sociologists think about “the social”. I am often struck by how applicable institutional ethnography is to such a wide variety of research projects. I look forward to an exciting year and I’m honoured to serve as the IE Division Chair. --Lauren 2013 Dorothy E. Smith Award to Professor Roxana Ng Professor Roxana Ng, who passed away early this year, was recognized for her scholar-activism during a memorial held after the IE Division’s August 2013 business meeting in New York City. Award committee member Suzanne Vaughan sent along this tribute for inclusion in the newsletter. This tribute will also hang alongside the award to be housed in a special display case at the Centre for Women’s Studies in Education (CWSE) at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (University of Toronto). “The committee wishes to honour Roxana Ng with the Dorothy E. Smith Scholar-Activism Award for 2013. This award given by the IE Division of the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP) recognizes the activities of an individual or group who has made substantial contributions to institutional ethnographic scholar-activism in either a single project or a trajectory of work. Roxana Ng has made significant contributions to institutional ethnography through her scholarship and activism on behalf of immigrants. At the time of her death in January 2013, Roxana was a Professor of Adult Education and Community Development at OISE, Director of the Centre for Women’s Studies in Education, and a board member of Inter Pares, a feminist and social justice oriented international development agency working with grassroots groups and coalitions in the economic south. Roxana published extensively in the areas of immigration, feminism, anti-racism, and embodied learning. She was well known for her IE work on how globalization and work restructuring are transforming the lives of garment workers, many of whom are migrant women from Asia. In this connection, she worked with groups and individuals concerned with improving the working conditions of migrant workers’ lives. Her academic work on the experiences of immigrant women not only shaped Canadian immigration studies, but was integral to her activist work on behalf of marginalized women of colour within the community. She was a cofounder of the Vancouver Women’s Research Centre focusing on immigrant women in the areas of economic development, domestic violence, and sexual harassment and was instrumental in organizing immigrant women organizations across Canada. In addition she was active in a number of groups in Toronto including a group of garment sewers, the Chinese Canadian National Council - Toronto Chapter (CCNC Toronto - a social justice organization led by Chinese Canadians), and the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women (CRIAW - a NGO aimed at bridging academic and community-based feminist research). Roxana was an important presence at the SSSP and IE Division meetings. She never left her activism and concern for justice at the door. From the beginning she called on the division to incorporate inclusionary practices in program planning and to establish session topics that might introduce/draw people of colour to IE as a mode of inquiry. Given her commitment to anti-racist practices, she routinely took it upon herself to organize these joint IE sessions on immigration, labour, and globalization at the annual meetings. [Editors’ Note: Part 1 of the CWSE’s fall seminar series in honour of Roxana Ng is underway. IE Division members in and around Toronto may be interested in the November seminars. Details appear on the next page. In addition, division members may be interested in an online memorial video: http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/cwse/Roxana_Ng/index.html. Please also see page 5 for recent publications about Roxana and her scholarship.] Seminars in honour of Roxana Ng November 5 Jasjit Sangha Mothering, Embodiment and Adult Learning November 20 Naomi Nichols Investigating the Social Relations of Community Service Provision: Scholarship for Change CWSE will host these seminars in Room 2-227, 252 Bloor St. W., Toronto from noon to 2:00 pm. (Those planning to attend are encouraged to bring their lunch). Call for nominations The IE Division is pleased to solicit nominations for the 2014 Dorothy E. Smith Award for Scholar-Activism. This award recognizes the activities of an individual or group who has made substantial contributions to institutional ethnographic scholar-activism in either a single project or some longer trajectory of work. The contributions may involve IE research conducted and used for activist ends, or it may involve activist efforts that have drawn upon or contributed to IE scholarship. The award committee invites members of the IE Division to send a one-page statement describing the contributions of the nominee to Suzanne Vaughan at svaughan@asu.edu by May 1, 2014. Nicola Waters receives George W. Smith Graduate Student Paper Award Nicola Waters of Mount Royal University is the 2013 winner of the George W. Smith Graduate Student Paper Competition. An abstract of her award-winning paper follows. “Under the banner of continuous quality improvement, process mapping has become an increasingly routine feature of healthcare administration. Driven by demands to improve efficiency through standardization, nurses’ knowledge of their, often unpredictable, work is routinely changed to fit within graphical representations that depict it as objectively controllable. It is the tensions that arise as I try to apply my knowledge as a specialist nurse in the rapidly changing area of wound care that form the direction for my institutional ethnography (IE) inquiry. As a student new to IE, my search for a way to articulate my use of Dorothy Smith’s alternative sociology to unpick how nurses’ wound work is being mapped, drew me to explore the ruling relations embedded in cartographic practices. The parallels I discovered between the ‘counter-cartography’ movement and the problematic emerging in my own study helped me to recognize how using IE offers the potential to draw a quite different picture of nurses’ wound work, one which challenges the official versions of their world on paper.” Call for papers The IE Division solicits papers for its 2014 George W. Smith Graduate Student Paper Competition. To be considered, papers should advance institutional ethnography scholarship either methodologically or through a substantive contribution. For an overview of institutional ethnography and the purposes of the IE Division, see http://sssp1.org/index.cfm/pageid/1236/m/464. Authors must be currently enrolled graduate students or have graduated within the last 12 months. Submissions are to be 25 pages long or less, excluding notes, references and tables, and be submitted in Word-compatible format, in 12-point Times New Roman font. An electronic letter from the student’s supervisor attesting to the lead author’s student status must accompany the submission. Prizes include a $100 cash award, registration fees, an opportunity to present the winning paper at the 2014 SSSP meetings and a ticket to the SSSP awards banquet. The winner of the 2014 paper will be invited to sit on the adjudicating panel for the 2015 paper submissions. Please note that any paper submitted for consideration for the George W. Smith Graduate Student Paper Award must also be submitted to be presented at the 2014 meeting of the SSSP. Send submissions to ALL of the following members of the 2014 review committee: Janet Rankin (jmrankin@ucalgary.ca), Sobia Shaikh (sobia_shaikh@hotmail.com), and Nicola Waters (nrwaters@ucalgary.ca). Getting involved in the IE Division --submitted by Paul Luken The IE Division is certainly not the largest division in SSSP, but its members continue to be very active in the Society as officers and committee members. SSSP has many opportunities for members, including student members, to serve on committees and to be officers in the Society. Many of the committees are filled by appointment processes, but others are elected. Every year there is a call for nominees for these four committees Budget, Finance, and Audit Committee; Committee on Committees; Editorial and Publications Committee; and Membership and Outreach Committee. Additionally, there is call for nominees for these offices: President-Elect, Vice-President Elect, Board of Directors and Student Representative of the Board of Directors. Some appointed committees include the Permanent Organization and Strategic Planning Committee and the Accessibility Committee. Award committees are also appointed. These include C. Wright Mills Award Committee, Lee Founders Award Committee, Racial/Ethnic Minority Graduate Scholarship Committee, Lee Student Support Fund Committee, Lee Scholar Support Fund Committee, Erwin O. Smigel Award Committee, Thomas C. Hood Social Action Award Committee, and Joseph B. Gittler Award Committee. While there is a call for nominations for the elected positions, the appointed positions are another matter. To be considered for these positions it is best to indicate your interest when you renew your membership in SSSP. If you do not express a willingness to serve on an appointed committee, it is very unlikely that you will be asked. To learn more about these and other committees, you can consult the SSSP Operations Manual or the By-Laws. (http://www.sssp1.org/index.cfm/m/74/m/30) (http://www.sssp1.org/index.cfm/m/29/locationSectionId/0/By-Laws#vi). [Editors’ Note: After Paul submitted this newsletter item, the SSSP circulated a message about the opening of nominations for candidates to run in the 2015 General Election. Division Chair Lauren Eastwood forwarded the message to all members shortly thereafter, reinforcing the importance of having IE members in elected and committee positions in SSSP. The online nomination form is available at http://www.sssp1.org/index.cfm/pageid/1082/] New publications Bisaillon, L. (2013). Disease, disparities and decision making: Mandatory HIV testing of prospective immigrants to Canada. BioéthiqueOnline, 2(10), 1-6. Available at http://bioethiqueonline.ca/archives/4397 Carpenter, S., Ritchie, G., & Mojab, S. (2013). The dialectics of praxis. (For Roxana Ng: An unfinished conversation). Socialist Studies, 9(1), 1-17. Cobourn, E. (2013). Roxana Ng: Thinking and acting against the grain. Socialist Studies, 9(1), 18-21. DeVault, M. (2013). Institutional ethnography: A feminist sociology of institutional power. Contemporary Sociology, 42(3), 332-340. Melon, K.A., White, D., & Rankin, J. (2013). Beat the clock! Wait times and the production of ‘quality’ in emergency departments. Nursing Philosophy, 14(3), 223-237. Peter Grahame sends word about an article on institutional ethnography added to the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology and available online only through libraries with a current subscription to the encyclopedia. Please check with your reference librarian on the status of your library's subscription. Otherwise, Peter will to respond to individuals who would like to receive a copy of the article. He can be reached at prg11@psu.edu. Call for abstracts Gender, Work & Organization will host its 8th international, interdisciplinary conference at Keele University in the UK from June 24 to 26, 2014. Marie Campbell (University of Victoria-emeritus), Elena Kim (American University of Central Asia), Rebecca Lund (Aalto University), Emily Porschitz (Keene State College), Janet Rankin (University of Calgary-Qatar) and Jonathan Tummons (Durham University) are collaborating to organize a conference stream titled: Discovering gender relations in people’s conduct of organizations. The stream’s organizers invite papers employing any form of analysis that moves beyond categorical understandings of gender to expand our knowledge of how people are organized to relate to each other, especially through the textually-mediated institutional technologies of large organizations. Their interest includes, but is not restricted to, the relations of subordination that we understand to be gendered. The papers we should like to see at this stream: -provide a material analysis that draws attention to the institutional forms of organizing men and women at work. -expand our empirical understandings of the work processes that are often textually and technologically-choreographed to produce what an organization counts as ‘productive activity’. -explicitly reject analytical and theoretical frameworks that treat organizational structure, people, gender, ethnicity, class, age, ability, etc., as discreet categories that intersect or otherwise influence each other. -shed light on how contemporary organizations are being coordinated (and are coordinating their interests and activities) within an increasingly globalized economy. -offer empirical and/or theoretical debate and insight into how institutional ethnography and related approaches are useful for understanding gender (and other) relations in contemporary organizations and management. Abstracts of approximately 500 words (on ONE page, in WORD NOT PDF, single spaced, excluding any references, no headers, footers or track changes) are invited by November 1 2013 with decisions on acceptance to be made by stream leaders within one month. All abstracts will be peer reviewed. New and young scholars with 'work in progress' papers are welcomed. In the case of co-authored papers, ONE person should be identified as the corresponding author. Note that due to restrictions of space, multiple submissions by the same author will not be timetabled. Abstracts should be submitted to Rebecca Lund: rebecca.lund@aalto.fi Abstracts should include FULL contact details, including your name, department, institutional affiliation, mailing address and email address. Member news and notes Laura Bisaillon, now an Assistant Professor of Health Studies at the University of Toronto (Scarborough) and an appointee to the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the same university received the 2013 Distinguished Dissertation Award from the Canadian Association for Graduate Studies. The award recognizes an unusually significant and original contribution in the Fine Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. For more information, please go to http://www.cags.ca/cagsumi.php. Laura’s award-winning dissertation is titled: Cordon Sanitaire or Healthy Policy? How Prospective Immigrants with HIV are Organized by Canada’s Mandatory HIV Screening. Added to Dorothy E. Smith’s scholarly list of accomplishments is a lifetime achievement award from the American Sociological Association’s Marxist Sociology Section. At an August 2013 reception, Roslyn Wallach Bologh, a sociology professor at the College of Staten Island and CUNY Graduate School, thanked Dorothy “for work that has enriched and benefited so many people, work that has enriched and transformed the social sciences, and work that continues to jolt social science forward in exciting new and progressive ways.” For more information, please go to http://www.peoplesworld.org/feminist-and-marxist-dorothy-smith-receives-lifetime-sociology-award Welcome to new members Twelve new members have joined the IE Division since the last newsletter. Welcome all! Joan Liaschenko Dann Hoxsey Valerie Damasco Robert Paul Marisa Tate Stone Sarah Donley Jason Struna Valerie Feldman Valli Rajah Megan Petersen Matthew Strang Maren Hansen-Kramer Shivaani Selvaraj Call for manuscripts “New Scholarship in Institutional Ethnography”: A special issue of the Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare For this issue we are soliciting innovative work by new authors. We will feature those scholars and social activists who are relative newcomers with respect to publishing and whose work extends institutional ethnography by using novel approaches to data collection and analysis or that focuses on areas that have not been investigated previously. We hope to highlight the up and coming generation of IE practitioners and their work. Submissions should also be appropriate for JSSW, a journal that “promotes the understanding of social welfare by applying social science knowledge, methodology and technology to problems of social policy, politics, the social ecology, and social services.” This includes a wide array of topics of interest to institutional ethnographers. The deadline for submissions is January 31, 2014. Electronic copy can be sent to pluken@westga.edu. Please put “IE JSSW” in the subject line of your email. Submissions will be peer reviewed. Only submit material that has neither been published nor is being considered for publication elsewhere. Manuscripts should be prepared according to JSSW guidelines that are copied below. Preparation Articles should be typed in a 12-point font, double-spaced (including the abstract, indented material, footnotes, and references), with one-inch margins on all sides. Tables may be submitted single-spaced. Please provide a running head and keywords with manuscript. Include tables and figures in the same document as the narrative. Keep identifying information out of the narrative. Put identifying information in a separate document with full contact information and any acknowledgments. Aim for approximately 18 pages, not counting tables and references. Avoid footnotes and endnotes if possible. Overall style should conform to that found in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. Guest Editors Paul C. Luken Dept. of Sociology University of West Georgia Suzanne Vaughan Dept. of Social and Behavioral Sciences Arizona State University The line up for San Francisco The IE Division will meet August 15-17, 2014 during the 64th Annual Meeting of the SSSP. Sessions sponsored or co-sponsored by the IE Division follow. For more information, please contact the organizer(s) and consult the official Call for Papers at http://www.sssp1.org/index.cfm/m/565/. IE Division Sessions Title: New Directions in Institutional Ethnography Research Organizers: Sophie Pomerleau (sophie.pomerleau@mail.mcgill.ca) and Annie Carrier (annie.carrier@usherbrooke.ca) Title: Methodological Innovations in Institutional Ethnography (Critical Dialogue) Organizers: Liza McCoy (mccoy@ucalgary.ca) and Suzanne Vaughan (suzanne.vaughan@asu.edu) Title: The Social Organization of Health Professional Work Organizers: Nicola Waters (nrwaters@ucalgary.ca) and Karen Melon (melonjk@telus.net) Co-Sponsored Sessions Title: The Social Organization of Families Under Scrutiny (Thematic) Co-Sponsoring Division: Families Organizer: Elizabeth Brule (ebrule@yorku.ca) Title: Institutional Ethnographers Organizing for Change: Making Change from Below (Critical Dialogue) Co-Sponsoring Division: Conflict, Social Action and Change Organizers: Marie Campbell (mariecam@uvic.ca) and Cheryl Zurawski (cdz@arialassociates.com) Title: The Organization of Trans-local/Global Governance, Law and Policy Co-Sponsoring Division: Global Organizer: Lauren Eastwood (lauren.eastwood@plattsburgh.edu) Title: Technology and its Impact on the Everyday: Institutional Management of Risk Co-Sponsoring Division: Environment and Technology Organizer: Hans-Peter de Ruiter (hans-peter.de-ruiter@mnsu.edu)   Title: Are You Being Served? Institutional Ethnographies of Social Services and Frontline Workers in an Age of Austerity (Thematic) Co-Sponsoring Divisions: Labour and Sociology and Social Welfare Organizer: Matthew Strang (matthew.strang@gmail.com) Title: Power, Knowledge and the Politics of Reality Co-Sponsoring Division: Social Problems Theory Organizer: Jared Del Rosso (jared.delrosso@du.edu) Title: Bodies of Knowledge: Technologies of Embodiment and Social Organization Co-Sponsoring Division: Sport, Leisure and the Body Organizer: Matthew Strang (matthew.strang@gmail.com) 8