IE Workshops With Dorothy E. Smith, PhD and Susan M. Turner, PhD. Weekend Workshop: Working with Institutional Ethnography June 2 - June 4, 2017 $550 CDN + 13% HST (non-refundable deposit of $160 CDN due April 28, 2017) Mini description The Weekend Workshop translates the formulation of Institutional Ethnography (IE) as a method of inquiry and its approach to language and texts into a research practice for you to use and to know how to explain and justify it to others. The key to doing Institutional Ethnography is grasping its distinct social ontology, central concepts and forms of inquiry and description that make IE fundamentally a distinct sociology. Understanding language and texts as integral to forms of social organization and how IE addresses these in ethnographic practice, is central. The workshop will be of interest to those wanting to clarify their understanding of IE, and to learn and practice various analytic strategies for incorporating texts. Friday and Saturday will include presentations and beginning a practice exercise using a topic of concern to you. Saturday and Sunday will include practice, presentation of what is learned, and discussion. Preparation We will ask you to do some readings prior to arriving and bring a candidate text for use in the practical work. Dorothy and Susan will be in touch with registrants prior to the weekend. The IE Weeklong Working Intensive June 5 - June 9, 2017 $950 CDN + 13% HST (Non-refundable deposit of $270 CDN due April 28, 2017) Enrollment in the weeklong intensive is limited to a maximum of 6. Prerequisite: participation in Weekend Workshop either right before or in previous years (paid separately). Mini description Offers participants the opportunity to work closely with Dorothy and Susan and co-participants on your own project. It is a practical working week, running daily from 9:30-5:30. Activities comprise short group meetings, Dorothy and Susan meeting with individuals about their own projects, ad hoc consultations and daily discussion sessions. The Intensive Working Week focuses on the specifics of the application of Institutional Ethnography to the projects of participants. Participants can talk about issues, problems, and discoveries in your own project work and discuss in-common questions on IE methods and any issues about Institutional Ethnography that have arisen in relation to your project as it is developing. Preparation Participants must have attended a weekend workshop or have adequate experience with Institutional Ethnography (contact Lorena at CWSE). Bring your laptop as you are provided co-working space where you can settle down to work. In advance, you will be asked to write a short informal email to Dorothy and Susan, saying something about what you plan to be working on during the week. Members News and Notes Marie Campbell and Janet Rankin announce the early view of the article titled: Nurses and electronic health records in a Canadian hospital: examining the social organisation and programmed use of digitised nursing knowledge scheduled for publication in Sociology of Health and Illness, (March, 2017). doi: 10.1111/1467-9566.12489 Janna Klostermann used IE to explore the work of visual artists in Canada in her Master of Arts thesis entitled Art Working: An Institutional Ethnography of the Art World (2015) and also in her recent article: (2016).Write like a visual artist:Tracing artists work in Canadas textually mediated art world.Literacy and Numeracy Studies.24(2). Image from Janna Klostermann's MA thesis, Figure 8. JinnyYu, Ball; Studio Work Number 37; Ball; Column; Stalker; Painting, Painting, Painting, 2014, installed at Ottawa ArtGallery. Courtesy of the artist. Janna Klostermann also has two successful grant applications to explore the work of live-in care-givers: Klostermann, Janna. (2015).The politics of 'living with': Tracing sites of work and worry for live-in caregivers.Canada Graduate Scholarship proposal. Klostermann, Janna. (2015). "The invisible work of living with: Explicating the social organization of care from the standpoint of live-in attendants in Ontarios developmental service sector. Ontario Graduate Scholarship proposal. Cathy Ringham has successfully completed her PhD. Cathy's institutional ethnography explored nurses work in Level Two ICUs. She developed a view into the social organization of nurses work to feed infants. It is an important contribution, both toIE and to NICUs. The analysis also has broader implications for the discipline of nursing. Picking up on Smiths (1987) multiple discontinuities a term that Smith used to describe the character of mothering and homemaking work, Cathy has examined the various origins of guidelines, protocols, policies and doctors orders to show how they result in an incoherence, indeed, contradictory, set of directions for everyday work. The essential character of nurses' work has been disrupted. The ideological trend toward breaking activity into formulations of "high risk for the quality and safety discourse, or into best practice for the evidence movement combined with clinical technologies such as smart pumps and barcoding technologies -- coordinate nurses to pay attention to alarms and to follow highly scrutinized, step-wise processes. These discursive practices and technologies leave nurses, in Cathys terms, caring for babies out of the corners of their eyes. Cathy was supervised by Janet Rankin and Carol Ewashen in the Faculty of Nursing at the University of Calgary. Maureen Sanders-Brunneradvanced to candidacy after herIEdissertation research proposal was accepted by her committee. Her working title is: Teacher leadership as work: The social organization of teacher influence over in-service professional development. She reports: Prior to proposing this dissertation project, I engaged in an IRB approved preliminary study where I identified an entry-point, urban high school research site as well as several teacher leader informants. From this preliminary study I was able to construct the beginnings of a problematic within the experiences of non-administrative classroom teachers who regularly engage in unpaid work to shape and improve professional development for the benefit of their colleagues and students. I am now advancing to the second stage of my data collection and analysis where I will interview, observe, and collect documents from informants at school- and district- level administrative locations and, hopefully, actors in related state-level locations as well. Call for Papers Secrecy and Society Volume 1, Issue 2 CFP: Secrecy and Authoritarianism, including Populist Visions of Authoritarianism IE work welcome This call for papers is a response to resurgent political trends, especially in the wake of recent world events and social movements. In Issue 2 of Secrecy and Society, we address the subject of secrecy and authoritarianism, including how ideology and popular beliefs are constituted through knowledge claims such as "alternative facts," disinformation, disingenuous rhetoric, populist conspiracy theory, post-truth, and propaganda. We welcome papers that also propose novel theories and methods that conceptualize these subjects. The inspiration for this special section is Richard Hofstadters paranoid style in politics, history as conspiracy, and ideas on anti-intellectualism. We encourage scholars, including doctoral students, from around the globe to submit their work. In addition to papers on the theme of secrecy and authoritarianism, submissions that address any aspect of secrecy and society will also be considered. For types of submissions accepted, including case studies and reviews, see http://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/secrecyandsociety/about.html Important Dates Deadline for abstracts: March 20, 2017 Deadline for submissions June 15, 2017 Publication of issue: July, 2017 All submissions must be made online through the Scholarworks platform. Secrecy and Society provides a forum for scholars, decision makers, and the public to examine secrecy in all its manifestations. For more information, including style and review process, see the Journal's Web site at: http://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/secrecyandsociety Contact: Email inquiries to the managing editor ~ susan.maret@sjsu.edu Welcome New Members Twenty new members have joined the IE Division since the publication of our last newsletter. Welcome all! Nicole K. Dalmer Zita Dixon Chelsi C. Florence Mandi M. Gray Ying-Syuan (Elaine) Huang Jelani Ince June Jeon Rashmee Karnad-Jani Rachael M. Lee May-Linda Magnussen Avideh K. Mayville Genevive McCready Caroline Morris Erin Pearce Guillermo Rosabal-Coto Jennifer M. Stevens Catherine Turco Brandon Vaidyanathan Kelly Ward Kim Williams-Pulfer Marie Campbell Interviews Karly Burch At the business meeting in Seattle last August, we decided to introduce our Newsletter readership to newcomers to IE research. The idea is to illustrate for students and other readers IEs broad applicability to very different topics. If you have a suggestion, or would like to be interviewed yourself, let the editor [Gina] know. Thanks to Karly Burch for her collaborative effort with me in making the following account of her exciting research. We look forward to hearing more from her as her research proceeds. Marie Campbell. Karly Burch chooses institutional ethnography to study what happens when radionuclides from the Fukushima nuclear disaster end up on peoples dinner plates. Karly came to institutional ethnography indirectly. After her undergraduate degree from UC Santa Barbara, she developed an interest in food sovereignty and the anti-GMO movement which took her to India, and eventually led to her pursuing a European Master of Science degree in agroecology. While in Europe, the Tokyo Electric Power Companys Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant exploded, scattering anthropogenic radionuclides around the globe, concentrated mostly in north-eastern Japan and the Pacific Ocean. Because she was studying about food systems and has a personal connection to Japan - (her partner is Japanese) she returned (home) to Wakayama, Japan, where she began researching how the nuclear disaster was impacting Japans food system. Karly explains the development of her research topic: I was hoping to explore the topic of radiation and food and found myself in the field of risk perception research. Due to the level of my Japanese language proficiency at the time, I was not able to conduct interviews on my own, so I needed to depend on surveys for my research. My interest at the time was to survey both peoples perceptions and behaviors related to the possible presence of radionuclides in Japans food system. I created the surveys by attending meetings of people concerned about radiation in the food system and listening to the thoughts they were expressing and how they had been coping with the situation. In my surveys I included people who attended meetings about radiation and food, as well others who had never attended such meetings, and also university students. My results revealed that most people lacked trust in the governments information and in any mass communication about the after-effects of the disaster; most people were concerned about radiation in the food system, and the people attending the meetings were actively changing their everyday food routines. But I also found that when people changed their diets, they followed the information provided by the government. For example, government test results indicated that food such as mushrooms, tea and seafood tended to be more easily contaminated than other foods, and that most contaminated foods were coming from 17 prefectures in north-eastern Japan, so many of the people I surveyed would avoid purchasing such foods. I was dissatisfied with my surveys feeling that the complexity of peoples experiences was not fully represented in the survey process. I was always happy when I did receive surveys with comments added, as I knew that my questions were not able to grasp the entirety of their experiences. Now that I was living full-time in Japan, I couldnt stop thinking about the ongoing catastrophe unleashed following the onset of the nuclear disaster in March 2011, and so I decided to pursue PhD studies in environmental sociology which took me to the University of Otago, New Zealand in February 2015. Moving into sociology and finding IE: In New Zealand, in a three-year British-style PhD program, Karly was introduced to a number of sociological theories that were to help her to understand the wicked problems facing Japans post-nuclear disaster food system. She continues telling her story: I was expected to choose a theory in year one, go to Japan to conduct fieldwork in year two, and then return to New Zealand to finish writing up my thesis in year three. I struggled a lot with the first year, mostly because I felt uncomfortable choosing a theory to explain peoples experiences, especially before I had a chance to meet and talk with them. I initially turned to Ulrich Beck (Risk Society) and Michel Foucault (Governmentality) because I was not only interested in the nature of the disaster, but in examining the management of the disaster by both the government and local people, as well as the interplay between the two. During my six-month review, the convener of the meetinga methods professorsuggested I looked into Institutional Ethnography. I looked into IE and read, among other things, Katherine Teghtsoonians paper Methods, discourse, activism: comparing institutional ethnography and governmentality. In the end I decided to push on with governmentality, both because I had become so attached to it after working on it for so long, but also because I felt that choosing IE would entail learning a whole new vocabulary and way of seeing that was very different (and possibly incompatible) with governmentality. I returned to Japan in January 2016 ready to plan a governmentality-based study, but I was still not very sure about how to go about conducting my research. I knew that I wanted to conduct in depth interviews exploring governance and power relations, but what was I really looking for? And how would I connect peoples everyday experiences with the greater food system and regulations governing the food system? It was at that point of confusion that I ordered Marie Campbell and Frances Gregors book Mapping Social Relations and I was completely sold on using IE. Among others, IEs attention to avoid objectifying participants experiences, its focus on activity (instead of focusing on explaining why the activities take place), and the ultimate goal of providing research results that can help participants to see their everyday situation with a different perspective were reasons why I felt it was a great method of inquiry. The aspect about objectification was especially important to me since people concerned about radiation in the food system are often seen as crazy or overly concerned by the mass media, government and others in society. I, therefore, was hoping to address the issue without focusing on individual perceptions and differences, and instead finding similarities in experiences of people throughout society who are addressing the possible presence of radionuclides in the food system and trying to understand how these experiences are being organized. I really liked that IE addresses the fact that the researcher herself is embedded within the same ruling relations as the studys participants. My worry about governmentality was always about how I would explain my results to my participants once I completed my research. I could imagine being able to explain the results of an IE research that maps how everyday experiences are being organized by powerful, trans-local forces. I wrote a long email to my supervisors telling them why I decided to change the theoretical and methodological base of my project, and was met with warm words of encouragement. I then quickly ordered Marjorie DeVaults book Feeding the Family: The Social Organization of Caring as Gendered Work, downloaded the kindle versions of a number of Dorothy Smiths books and read a number of IE articles. I also found Susan Marie Turners PhD thesis Municipal planning, land development and environmental intervention: an institutional ethnography to be very useful as it gave me an idea of what a PhD project in IE could look like. After a heavy-duty two months of digging into IE, I began my interviews in March 2016. Inspired by Marjorie DeVaults book, I began my inquiry with a focus on food and peoples everyday food practices. As someone living in Japan, I realized that after the disaster of the nuclear explosions disappeared from television screens, questions about the management of Tokyo Electric Power Companys radionuclides in the food system were something that lived on, creating inescapable and invisible distress for people trying to avoid eating radionuclides - in light of the fact that the government said the food was safe! Karly tells how the study has taken shape: My study is based on the standpoint of people living in the Kansai area of Japan600 kilometers from Tokyo Electric Power Companys reactors people who are in some way concerned about the possible presence of radionuclides in the food system and taking action in their own lives to manage their concerns. I have interviewed women, men, restaurant owners, preschool principals, journalists, people who had evacuated from north-eastern Japan (ranging from 10 to more than 200 kilometers from the nuclear disaster), people working at citizen radiation measuring stations, and people who organize summer camps for children living in radioactive fallout zones in order to recuperate and detox the radiation from their bodies. During the interviews, I ask people to tell me about when they became aware of nuclear radiation and the actions they took to apply the newfound knowledge to their everyday lives. I ask them specific questions about the work involved in managing radiation in their everyday lives and diets, or in their work (in the case of school lunch planning, restaurants, etc.). I ask people to show me books, websites, articles, videos, any kinds of texts they use to inform their activities. I listen to the language they use to describe their activities and I ask questions about where they heard and what they understood by such lingo (for example, phrases appearing in government bulletins such as harmful rumors or reconstruction). When talking to journalists, lawyers and other professionals, I ask about specific laws that currently organize the food system. While it has been difficult to find government officials to interview, all of the governments policies and manuals for the management of radionuclides in the food system are online and written about in books, articles, etc. In addition to the interviews, I have attended more than 50 different events, court cases, lectures on the topic of radiation. Conducting my research in Japanese has been a difficult but pleasurable experience. Because my conversational Japanese is at the right level, I have a lot of fun conducting interviews. People are very happy to discuss these topicswhich are seen as taboo and better left unsaid by many people in society. Transcription has been the most difficult part thus far, but because all of my participants have agreed to review the transcripts, this will help in validating my transcription attempt. Managing the texts has also been difficult, not only because they are in Japanese, but because I travel to New Zealand periodically and need to be able to access all of the texts while there. At the moment I am swimming in a complex of textual data. I am trying to map out how the governments laws and management of radionuclides in the food system organize the everyday lives of people living 600 kilometers from the nuclear disaster, the different forms of knowledge used to inform different activities/policies and how (and by whom or what technical device) such knowledge is produced. Karly concludes: Attending the ISA Forum and SSSP Conference this summer and having the chance to meet other IE scholars has been an invaluable experience for me at this stage of my research, providing me with a lot of valuable feedback and encouragement that has helped me during the second half of my fieldwork collection. IE Facebook Post Cathy Ringham wrote in the Facebook group, Students of Institutional Ethnography: This is a long post but may be of help to others who are writing their dissertations or defending soon. We no longer have the IE working group so I thought this group might be the next best thing! I have been asked about rigour in IE as I prepare for defense in the coming months. A couple of years agoPeter R. Grahameresponded to someone in this group suggesting that having a neat and tidy answer or how to directions to deal with the issue of rigour is not possible (thank you for participating in the discussions on this forum Peter). He is quite right. I have been digging and cannot find a one size fits all package of instructions. One part of me would really like to have a standardized answer. But that would mean IE would also have conventional methodological procedures and a rigid, standardized approach to inquiry. And as Peter said, it would be antithetical to IE. To address rigour do we not have to return to the ontological assumptions of IE: an ontology that addresses conceptually how the social exists with particular attention to actualities (things seen, heard, described, named, categorized, BUT also embodied experiences of people), and an investigation that happens in the same place that the IE researcher is exploring? Must we also clarify what standpoint means in IE: a subject position within the social arrangement where people whose standpoint position is being taken, are experts of their lives, experiences, and work? I think this is a good place to start the discussion about rigour. I also note in my methodology chapter that the IE researcher is positioned on the side of their standpoint informants (even as I write this I am not sure this is accurately expressed, but bear with me), meaning that we cannot stand objectively outside of the people, location, and time that we are exploring. The issue with my research/dissertation is that I have used some of my own experience/data in my analysis (Lisa WattI think you have also positioned yourself within your data by using your own accounts, right?). I empirically describe work processes from my own shift as a NICU nurse and I use it in my ethnographic descriptions of nurses work. My practical experience, as it was described, contributed to my analysis (I was working in the NICU where I did observations during my research which may bring up a whole other issue for my examiners). So the question is how can my account be rigorous; how is my experience data; how does the use of this data not bias the research? I used a particular piece of my own experience as data to support and underline informants experiences and descriptions of work processes in order to show the layers of knowledge nurses have/use in moment to moment decision making about patient care, knowledge that frequently is subsumed by technologies and institutional processes and this is what I illustrated. Given the ontological and standpoint position of the IE researcher, on the sidewalk rather than on the 14th floor, puts me as a researcher within the social world of my informants and as a NICU nurse (the same as my informants) in the same place and time with similar experiences. Furthermore, as the ethnographic data rests in empirical descriptions and is followed with the tracing of institutional processes and practices, I argue that the issue of bias is irrelevant. It is not the people being studied after all, it is the social organization of nurses knowledge and the coordination of it that is being traced through institutional processes that is of interest to the institutional ethnographer. Smith writes, The researcher is an observer, probably a participant observer of peoples everyday lives and how theyre coordinated locally, making the relevant extra-local relations visible as they enter into the coordinating of peoples work (Smith 2008). An IE approach does not require the researcher to stay outside their participants experience, rather to stay within peoples everyday lives, as they know it and report it. I think Tim Diamonds work is a seminal example of how participant observations (as researcher) works in an IE inquiry. Is this an adequate response to the tricky question of rigour and bias? I would appreciate any comments or critique, and would appreciate the experience any of you might have had in expressing these ideas successfully in your written work and in defense. Check out this post and more at: https://www.facebook.com/groups/studentsofinstitutionalethnography/ SSSP in Montreal The following are some of the exciting sessions planned for the Montreal meetings Marie Campbell is organizing a critical dialogue entitled Working with Narratives in Institutional Ethnographic Analysis. This years conference focuses on narrative (description) and its sociological possibilities. This Critical Dialogue session looks at the ways in which narrative is central to trustworthy social analysis and possible transformative action. The institutional ethnographic narrator engages the listener/reader in accounts of what actually happens to focus analytic attention on and problematize social situations for the purposes of illuminating, possibly transforming, them. Institutional ethnographers aim for accounts of the everyday world that guide processes of inquiry toward discoveries of the social relations of ruling operating in and organizing people's lives. This Critical Dialogue session invites presentations that help us understand and debate the challenges arising for a sociology (such as IE) in which narrative plays a key part in the analytic strategy. Janet Rankin is the session organizer for New directions in IE. New Directions can include any small innovations you have made to data collection, analysis, reaching new audiences etc.. The sessions goal is to generate discussion about practices that support IE (methods strategies, generating data, recruiting into high levels of institutional work, working with data, etc.) Cheryl Zurawski is organizing The Technologies of Telling co-sponsored with theEnvironment and Technology Division.Technologies tell particular stories. Sometimes, these stories are constructed from data already embedded in the technologies. The stories are there for the telling but they are only recounted when people who use the technologies are activated them. Other times, stories cannot be constructed until people enter data into the technologies. These stories are incomplete and not ready to be told until the act of data entry generates the report, read-out or other form of narrative or numerical representation that people then read and respond to in some way. This session invites papers that explicate the part that technologically-generated stories play in the social organization of knowledge. More specifically, it is interested in papers that draw attention to the unintended consequences technologically-generated stories produce when their moral (i.e., central theme or message) is expressed from the standpoint of institutions or organizations rather than the standpoint of the actualities of peoples everyday lives. Lauren Eastwood is organizing "Power, Resistance and Transformation In and With Institutions". This is a co-sponsored session between Institutional Ethnography and Sociology and Social Welfare. Research that uses institutional ethnography to investigate power, resistance and transformation is critical at this current juncture. I'd love to see what people are working on related to this topic! Matthew Strang is organizing How Bodies Become Marked and the Stories They Tell. Bodies are constantly being read and (re)inscribed in and through various [bodily & textually mediated] discourses, including discourses of race and racialization, gender, sexuality, class, ability and many other social relations of power. This session aims to elucidate the links between bodies and how they come to be understood in particular ways, throughactual practices [and] activities taking place in real time and places using definitive material means and under definite material conditions (Smith, 1990, 163).In their everyday lives, people do work on and through their bodies to be read and understood in particular ways. In other words, people [know] where to look for how they should look or how to look at others (Smith, 1990, 171). Some bodies have the privilege of being more malleable than others. How might the work that people do on their bodies, converge, and diverge with (ruling) relations of racialization, sexualization, gender, ability, age and other factors? What empirical links exist between everyday life and its social organization of bodies? This session is open to including papers that use Institutional Ethnography, as well as other frameworks, to understand and map out these relations. Papers can describe and reflect critically on specific empirical research projects, take a theoretical, methodological approach or adopt a more creative form. Naomi Nichols is organizing Institutional Ethnography and International Organizationssession. This session is designed with those of you in mind who do IE work in the context of international development initiatives or work which pertains to organizations that have an international focus (e.g., the OECD). If you are looking at the transnational coordination of social relations, your work fits here. If you are studying the proliferation of particular practices (e.g., intelligence-led policing) across national borders or the ways that activities in local schools orient to international standardized test data, you could consider submitting your work here. If you are interested in how funding processes link organizations (and peoples practices) across international contexts, please think about contributing to this session. Reflexivity, Research and Institutional Ethnography: How Analysis Changes Thinking is organized by Samit Dipon Bordoloi The session aims to bring together IE scholars to critically discuss how engaging in IE scholarship has changed the way we look at and think about institutions and organizational processes beyond our research purview. How does it impact our relations and interactions with people and institutions in our everyday life? How has it changed the way we think about social problems and the solutions that are put forward by institutions? This might be of particular interest to those of us working in and around academia where we engage in work processes (teaching, advising, mentoring and scholarship) that are increasingly driven by a neoliberal focus on productivity and are monitored, quantified and assessed. 10 IE Newsletter Volume 14 No. 2 IE Newsletter Vol. 14 No. 1 10