IE NEWSLETTER Institutional Ethnography Division of the Society for the Study of Social Problems Fall 2014 Vol. 12, No. 1 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 - Dorothy E. Smith award winner - New book edited by Griffith and Smith - IE session planning for Chicago - Member news, notes and publications From the Division Chair Lauren Eastwood Greetings! Those of us who attended the 2014 SSSP meetings in San Francisco can attest to the fact that the Institutional Ethnography Division is as robust and exciting as ever. We had invigorating sessions, a well-attended business meeting, and a day-long workshop following the meetings dedicated to small group discussions of projects in progress. Additionally, we were able to commit to an exciting array of sessions for 2015 in Chicago – some of which are stand-alone IE sessions and others of which are co-sponsored with other divisions (the list is included at the end of this newsletter). I greatly enjoyed working with our Chair-Elect, Naomi Nichols. Our teamwork facilitated the organizing for next year in ways that made the job much less onerous for me so thank you Naomi! For those who were unable to attend this year’s meetings, we hope to see you in Chicago next August. You will note on page 5, the call is now out for papers to be submitted to the George W. Smith Student Paper Award competition. Also on page 5 is the call for nominations for the Dorothy E. Smith Award for Scholar-Activism. Stay tuned, as well, for details regarding the post-conference workshop, as planning is under way. And do feel free to let us know if you’d like to be more involved in the IE Division! I can say without exaggeration that we are one of the more vibrant and active divisions in SSSP. This is testament, I think, not only to our commitment to IE but also to a genuine interest in each other’s work. I look forward to another exciting year and am honored to serve as the Institutional Ethnography Division Chair. –Lauren 2014 Dorothy E. Smith Award to Professor Eric Mykhalovskiy Suzanne Vaughan (Arizona State University) and Marjorie DeVault (Syracuse University) paired up to form the 2014 Dorothy E. Smith Scholar-Activist award committee. Below is the text of the presentation given at the business meeting recognizing Eric Mykhalovskiy (York University) as the 2014 award recipient. The committee wishes to honor Eric Mykhalovskiy with the Dorothy E. Smith Scholar-Activist Award for 2014. This award given by the Institutional Ethnography 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. Eric Mykhalovskiy has made significant contributions by combining his institutional ethnographic research with activism in the healthcare and HIV/AIDS fields for the last 20 years. This award honors his long-term commitment. Currently, Eric is an Associate Professor of Sociology at York University in Canada, has been an active participant in the Canadian AIDS movement, principally as a steering committee member of AIDS ACTION NOW! and founding member of the Ontario Working Group on Criminal Law and HIV Exposure. He currently serves on the community board of the HIV and AIDS Legal Clinic Ontario in Toronto. In addition, Eric is an extremely active scholar and has published over 40 single and co-authored peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, as well as three co-authored books. His work is widely cited and is recognized both nationally and internationally. He is a leading proponent of the use of institutional ethnographic research in community-based and activist research. In the early 1990s with the late George Smith, Eric pioneered early uses of institutional ethnography in community-based research in the “Hooking Up Project”. This work produced one of the first serious engagements with HIV and poverty in Canada. Further, following the completion in 2002 of what was to become a landmark institutional ethnographic study entitled “Making Care Visible”, Eric continued to develop the practice of collaborating with activists, people who work in community-based AIDS organizations, and other researchers in institutional ethnographic research (http://chodarr.org/node/1451). The collective focus of this work was on the social organization of access to and use of new biomedical treatments for HIV infection. In more recent years, Eric has worked with Canadian activists to produce and publish research that critiques the growing use of the criminal law to regulate the sexual activities of people living with HIV/AIDS (http://www.catie.ca/pdf/Brochures/HIV-non-disclosure-criminal-law.pdf). Eric is internationally recognized for his work on the criminalization of HIV non-disclosure, something he has used as a platform for organizing conferences, workshop sessions, and for creating publishing opportunities for activist researchers working on the issue of criminalization of HIV nondisclosure. As an educator, he continues to teach, mentor and inspire undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate students about the possibilities for combining institutional ethnography with activism. Over the years, a constant feature of Eric’s scholarship is a strong commitment to the political nature of the institutional ethnographic project. He has used his involvement in AIDS activism as a point of departure for his research and scholarship. As one nominator explained, "What commends Eric’s work most remarkably is that through it, he has taken up institutional ethnography as a sociology to produce knowledge for activists of socially organized powers shaping problems that activists themselves seek to confront and intend to change." Eric's activism and scholarship using institutional ethnography embody his concern for social and economic justice and we as a division honor his contributions. New IE collection edited by Griffith and Smith The University of Toronto Press recently published a new collection of institutional ethnographies in a book edited by Alison Griffith and Dorothy Smith. From the publisher’s website comes the following description of the collection. “The institutional ethnographies collected in Under New Public Management explore how new managerial governance practices coordinate the work of people doing front-line work in public sectors such as health, education, social services, and international development, and people management in the private sector. In these fields, organizations have increasingly adopted private-sector management techniques, such as standardized and quantitative measures of performance and an obsession with cost reductions and efficiency. These practices of “new public management” are changing the ways in which front-line workers engage with their clients, students, or patients. Using research drawn from Canada, the United States, Australia, and Denmark, the contributors expose how standardized managerial requirements are created and applied, and how they affect the practicalities of working with people whose lives and experiences are complex and unique.” Frank Ridzi (Le Moyne College) adds the following reflections on how the book came together. The production of Under New Public Management was itself an exercise in the institutional ethnographic approach. Called together from across nations a cadre of IE researchers at varying points in their careers arrived at York University in the Fall of 2009. Under the leadership, guidance and vision of Alison Griffith and Dorothy Smith, this group then set out to do what institutional ethnographers do: explicate the social world by delving deep into the details of everyday life. What united this group was a common interest in government and non-profit management and a curiosity about how what they could see from their own research endeavors could be further illuminated by the discoveries of IE colleagues in an assortment of related social sites. The result of this gathering, funded by Canada’s Social Science and Humanities Research Council, was a multi-year relationship in which collaborators probed the parallels and connections across their work, drafted ideas for illuminating these connections in writing and met to present together at subsequent conferences. In the end, this collaboration resulted in the 2014 publication of a remarkable contribution to the field that will hopefully not only spark further exploration but also serve as a model for future collaborations within the IE community. Other new publications Deveau, J.L. (2014). Using institutional ethnography’s ideological circle to portray how textually mediated disability discourse paralysed a Supreme Court of Canada Ruling. Culture and Organization, DOI: 10.1080/14759551.2014.940042 Jakubec, S.L., & Rankin, J.M. (2014). Knowing the right to mental health: The social organization of research for global health governance. Journal of Health Diplomacy, 1(2), 1-22. Welsh, M., & Rajah, V. (2014). Rendering invisible punishments visible: Using institutional ethnography in feminist criminology. Feminist Criminology, 9(4), 323-343. Notes and news from members Lindsay Kerr wants readers to know that in the next issue of this newsletter (February 2015), links to IE-focused web pages and blog sites will be posted. The intention is to compile resources for practitioners of IE including students, academics and activists. By the end of the year (or sooner if you can), please submit to Lindsay links to any such IE sites that exist, or brief information about sites that are in the process of being set up. Lindsay’s email address is lindsay.kerr@utoronto.ca Janet Rankin passes along the following note: As part of supporting the capacity to be granted IE funding, we need registered reviewers who can judge the merits of research proposals. Please register to be a reviewer with the granting agencies to which your students apply. Prominent Canadian funding agencies include the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). A granting agency that you may not consider is the Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF). I am now working in Qatar and there is a small but growing group of IE researchers here (Mike Corman, Kathleen Benjamin, Khadra Yassin). The QNRF recruits reviewers from an international community of scholars and invites potential reviewers to sign up online. Registration is fairly quick. If interested, please go to: https://www.qnrfsubmission.org/login.aspx You will need to indicate you are a "New User" and then click "Peer Reviewer" for your role. You will be walked through the registration, asked for some demographic information as well as to provide a short CV and a list of your subject expertise. I appreciate anyone who can take the time to do this and to participate in the anonymous reviews for the QNRF (and the other funders too!!). Thanks. Welcome to new members 10 new members have joined the IE Division since the publication of our last newsletter. Welcome all! Allison Schnable Emily Glazer Nicole Lindahl Cristina Khan Jerome Hendricks John Maguire Chelsea Mangold Steve Kroll-Smith Magdalena Ugarte Kiri Gurd STUDENT PAPER COMPETITION Deadline: 1/31/15 The Institutional Ethnography Division solicits papers for its 2015 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://www.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. The recipient will receive a monetary prize of $100, a plaque of recognition, student membership, conference registration, and an opportunity to present the winning paper at the (2015) SSSP meetings. The winner of the 2015 paper will be invited to sit on the adjudicating panel for the 2016 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 2015 meeting of the SSSP. Send submission to ALL of the following members of the 2015 review committee: Frank Ridzi ridzifm@lemoyne.edu , Nicola Waters nrwaters@ucalgary.ca , and Laurie Clune laurie.clune@uregina.ca . Please be aware that a paper submission may only be made to one division. DOROTHY E. SMITH AWARD FOR SCHOLAR-ACTIVISM Deadline: 5/1/15 The Institutional Ethnography Division is pleased to solicit nominations for the 2015 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 which have drawn upon or contributed to IE scholarship. The award committee invites members of the division to send a one-page statement describing the contributions of the nominee to Lauren Eastwood at eastwole@plattsburgh.edu , Suzanne Vaughan at svaughan@asu.edu and Marjorie DeVault at mdevault@maxwell.syr.edu by May 1, 2015. Looking ahead to SSSP in Chicago Planning is underway for IE sessions at the next SSSP annual meeting in Chicago (August 21-23, 2015). Below is a list of the nine sessions – three of which are being sponsored by the IE Division on its own and six more that are being sponsored by the IE Division in conjunction with other divisions within the SSSP. IE Division members who may be interested in submitting a paper to any of the sessions are welcome to contact the organizer/organizers for more information. Sessions Sponsored by the IE Division Title: Using Quantitative and other Mixed Methods in Institutional Ethnography Session Type: Critical dialogue Organizer: Frank Ridzi (ridzifm@lemoyne.edu) Title: New Research in Institutional Ethnography Session Type: Four papers plus discussant or five papers Organizers: Suzanne Vaughan (suzanne.vaughan@asu.edu) and Liza McCoy (mccoy@ucalgary.ca) Title: (Thematic) The Social Organization of Race, Class, Gender and other Relations of Ruling Session Type: Critical dialogue Organizer: Elizabeth Brule: (ebrule@yorku.ca) Co-Sponsored Sessions Title: (Thematic) Personal, Institutional and Professional Resistance: Gender, Race and Poverty Session Type: Four papers with discussant or five papers Co-Sponsors: Sociology and Social Welfare Division and the Poverty, Class and Inequality Division Organizer: Sobia Shaikh (sobia_shaikh@hotmail.com) Title: Accountability, Productivity and Digital Coordination of Human Service Work. Session Type: Critical dialogue Co-Sponsor: Labor Studies Division Organizers: Marie Campbell (mariecam@uvic.ca) and Hans-Peter de Ruiter (hans-peter.de-ruiter@mnsu.edu) Title: Migration and Human Rights Session Type: Four papers with discussant or five papers Co-Sponsors: Global Division and Law and Society Division Organizer: Laura Bisaillon (lbisaillon@utsc.utoronto.ca) Title: Reflections from the Field of Community-Based Research Session Type: Critical dialogue Co-Sponsor: Community Research and Development Division Organizers: Alison Fisher (Alison_Fisher@edu.yorku.ca) and Amie Thurber (amie.thurber@gmail.com) Title: (Thematic) Immigration: Representations, Institutions, & Identities Session Type: Four papers with discussant or five papers Co-Sponsor: Social Problems Theory Division Organizer: Fatima Sattar (sattarf@bc.edu) Title: The Body and Embodiment in Institutional Ethnography Session Type: Four papers with discussant or five papers Co-Sponsor: Sport, Leisure and the Body Division Organizer: Matthew Strang (matthew.strang@gmail.com) Future annual meetings 2015 Removing the Mask, Lifting the Veil: Race, Class, and Gender in the 21st Century August 21-23 Radisson Blu Aqua Hotel Chicago, IL 2016 Program theme to be determined August 19-21 Westin Seattle Hotel Seattle, WA 2017 Program theme to be determined August 11-13 Hilton Montreal Bonaventure Montreal, QC