IE NEWSLETTER Institutional Ethnography Division of the Society for the Study of Social Problems Fall 2010 Vol. 7, No. 3 Kamini Maraj Grahame Division Chair Department of Social Sciences Pennsylvania State University Harrisburg, PA Send correspondence to: Roz Stooke Correspondence and Copy Editor rstooke@uwo.ca Send photos and other images to: Cheryl Zurawski Production and Picture Editor cdz@arialassociates.com Proofreader: Linda Shorting On the inside: -Gittler Award to Ellen Pence -Dorothy E. Smith Award -Graduate Student Paper Award -Research in progress -Member news and more! FROM THE DIVISION CHAIR Kamini Maraj Grahame Hello everyone, The meetings in Atlanta are well behind us and the end of the fall semester has crept up on us. Our division has much to be proud of: our sessions were overall the best attended of the meetings, with spirited discussions that reflect the growth and development of our enterprise, and the richly deserved recognition of our own Ellen Pence who received the SSSP’s Joseph B. Gittler Award. The division welcomed many new members this year; the presence of newer scholars to institutional ethnography enriches and invigorates the field. Our joint reception with many of the other divisions was a huge success as was our business meeting. Thank you all for your efforts in making the division one of the most vigorous of the SSSP. As you know, the next SSSP annual meeting is in Chicago. The call for papers has already gone out and is posted on the SSSP website. Brief descriptions of the IE sessions appear near the end of the newsletter. Please submit papers directly to the session organizer(s). We will make every effort to find a way for you to present your work. One of the sessions is a roundtable for newer scholars to talk with a more experienced scholar as a discussant/organizer. Marj DeVault has agreed to undertake this task. Information regarding division awards can also be found in the newsletter. Faculty, please encourage your students to submit their papers for the George W. Smith Graduate Student Paper competition. Lauren Eastwood eastwole@plattsburgh.edu and this year’s winner, Li-Fang Liang lfliang.tw@gmail.com are the committee members for the 2011 student paper competition. Congratulations to Susan Turner, the recipient of the 2010 Dorothy E. Smith Award for Scholar-Activism. Please send your nominations for the 2011 Dorothy E. Smith Award to Lois Andre-Bechely: loisab@calstatela.edu At our business meeting, members expressed interest in a workshop in Chicago. We have been exploring the possibility and have set a date of Monday, August 15 (following the annual meetings). Thanks to Chris Wellin for getting the ball rolling in finding out about potential space. Also to Janet Rankin (our Chair-Elect) who has stepped up with the help of graduate students to explore further. Look for details in the February newsletter. Finally, I would like to thank Roz Stooke for her fine job in her first year as newsletter editor and I am pleased that she continues in this role. At our business meeting, we learned that Linda Shorting has been lending her expertise in the production of the newsletter and extend our thanks to her as well as Cheryl for her continuing work in making the newsletter a successful one. Our division continues to do splendidly in meeting our responsibilities to the SSSP and you are all partners in this accomplishment. Gittler Award to Ellen Pence Ellen Pence, previously honoured by the IE Division as a recipient of the Dorothy E. Smith Award for Scholar-Activism, was once again recognized for her contribution as the 2010 recipient of the Joseph B. Gittler Award. This award is made in recognition of the significant contribution that an SSSP member has made to the ethical resolution of social problems. Ellen is the co-founder of the Duluth Abuse Intervention Project (DAIP) and director of Praxis International, an organization that provides research and training to end violence in the lives of women and children. On February 6, 2010, the City of Duluth proclaimed Ellen Pence Day in recognition of her work in that city. In a letter to the award committee, Marj DeVault describes Ellen as a long-time scholar and activist who seeks to make sense of the dilemmas she faces in her activism: “Ellen’s work in the community audit process is especially impressive because she has successfully involved not only domestic violence advocates, but also a range of institutional actors. Her principles and analytic approach, combined with her ability to make friends across differences, have allowed her to mobilize entire communities in order to increase women’s safety.” Alex Barnes, a family friend who lives in New Zealand, travelled to Atlanta to accept the award (presented by Rose Brewer) on Ellen’s behalf. He offered these words honouring Ellen to mark the occasion: “As a close family friend and mentor, I have a deep appreciation for Ellen’s life work in strengthening the women’s movement through enhancing responses to battered women: ensuring that their safety and well-being is paramount.  Upon receiving the Gittler on her behalf, Ellen wanted me to speak about how important institutional ethnography has been in her work within the battered women’s movement. She described working as an activist in the women’s movement for over 30 years, and when she enrolled in her PhD in Toronto, Canada, she looked forward to having a break from the hard reality of activism in the community. Ironically, while working with Dorothy Smith on her dissertation, she came “under the spell” of institutional ethnography.  She realized the power and potential of institutional ethnography in transforming institutional responses towards women who are victims of violence and abuse.  Her dream of becoming a sociology lecturer was shattered!  She realized she had more work to do as a community activist. With the tools of institutional ethnography she developed a set of institutional audit tools that put women’s safety and the accountability of intervening institutions at the forefront of people’s work. This was a world first. It is with great pride that I was able to receive the Gittler Award on Ellen’s behalf. Her powerful presence, strong analysis, compassion and great humour are hallmarks of an activist, mentor and Aunty.” Congratulations Ellen! Susan Turner honoured as scholar-activist Congratulations to Susan Turner, the 2010 winner of the Dorothy E. Smith Award for Scholar-Activism. While Susan was unable to be in Atlanta, Chris Wellin, a member of the award committee (along with Tim Diamond) presented the award to Dorothy who accepted on Susan’s behalf. The Dorothy E. Smith Award for Scholar-Activism recognizes the activities of an individual or group who has made substantial contributions to institutional ethnographic scholar-activism in either a single project of some longer trajectory of work. A nomination letter received on Susan’s behalf summarizes the committee’s recommendation: “I nominate Susan Turner for the Dorothy E. Smith Scholar-Activist Award. For as long as I have known Susan, she has worked in that celebrated, hyphenated space, using her keen scholarly abilities to investigate the institutional relations that generate the issues that concern her and others as activists. We all know of her work on municipal land-use planning, which was her doctoral research (Dissertation of the Year at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education). We also know of her analytically-rich strategy for visually mapping complex institutional chains of text-talk-action. Susan developed and refined these techniques in part through conducting workshops with activists, in which she would lead the participants through a mapping exercise focused on the institutional and community relations shaping their everyday lives. In the last five or so years Susan held a key position coordinating a team of activists and university-based researchers working with the Rural Women Making Change Project based at the University of Guelph. In addition, she is currently bringing her skills as an institutional ethnographer to her work at the Law Foundation of Ontario. Susan Turner has made major contributions to the development of institutional ethnography, through her published writings, her mapping techniques, and the example of her scholar-activism. In my view, and I am sure in the eyes of all who know her work – she deserves this award.” Chris and Tim added two additional comments when they recommended Susan for the award: “One is to note that all during these public projects, Susan has spent countless hours on the other side of the line of fault, over there conducting and coordinating care for three generations of kin. What do you think, Susan, should we call this unpaid labour a form of activism? Can it become so? We conclude from your work on both sides of the line that you’d have a lot to say on these issues. Secondly, after Turner, institutional ethnographers now always have a place to begin. If you want to write an elegant, systematic account of how ruling works through step-wise sequences of talk and textual coordination, try starting in your own back yard. For this insight, Susan, we thank you.” Li-Fang Liang receives George W. Smith Award Congratulations to Li-Fang Liang of Syracuse University, the 2010 recipient of the George W. Smith Graduate Student Paper Award. The award is given to a graduate student who has advanced institutional ethnography scholarship either methodologically or through a substantive contribution. The award-winning paper titled “Defining and Regulating Care Needs: The Power of the State and Professional Knowledge” was presented by Kamini Grahame, Division Chair, to Marj DeVault who accepted the award on Li-Fang’s behalf. Committee members Liza McCoy and Ali Gabriel (last year’s recipient) offered these words in recommending Li-Fang for the 2010 award: "This paper is based in extensive empirical research and offers a very interesting analysis of an institutional process in Taiwan for regulating access to entitlement to hire foreign live-in caregivers for the elderly. The committee members appreciated the paper’s strong foundation in institutional ethnography, its grounding in the everyday actualities of Taiwanese families and medical professionals, its use of interview data, and its examination of the ways families, medical professionals and the state use a standardized assessment tool, the Barthel Index, to determine eligibility for a foreign caregiver. This study makes an important contribution to our understanding of the institutional governance of the transnational migration of labour." Learning what an institutional ethnographer actually does: A graduate student’s perspective --Holly C. Parkinson (University of Western Ontario) Campbell and Gregor (2008, p. 18) advise students who are beginning to learn about IE to turn to other IE studies. Reading the work of others can help students as they begin to engage with organizational texts and explore how ruling works. In the following review, doctoral student, Holly C. Parkinson, discusses what she learned from Julie Vaillancourt’s Ontario Works-Works for Whom? In Ontario Works-Works for Whom? Julie Vaillancourt describes an IE investigation into the Ontario Works program. Ontario Works is a work-for-welfare program implemented in 1996 as part of the Harris government’s restructuring of the welfare system. Vaillancourt argues that such programs are implemented under the guise of helping people make the transition from social assistance to paid employment, but they are usually mandatory and almost always coercive. Her study shows that the institutional ideology of the Ontario Works program is consistent with neoliberal discourse. She notes that barriers to employment are related to the individual while the social relations that produce poverty are ignored. The neoliberal ideologies on which programs are based are disconnected from the everyday lived realities of people on social assistance. Vaillancourt’s book is based on her master’s thesis, but her interest in the Ontario Works program stems from her personal knowledge of and experiences with a similar program. She adopted IE’s specialized way of looking and knowing as a means of making sense of some troubling aspects of her work and learning how it was “implicated in bringing [troubling] situations into being” (Campbell & Gregor, 2008, p. 23). One aspect of the book I found helpful was the description of the IE interview process. The author discusses the types of questions that an IE interviewer might use, describes how the flow of an informal conversational interview happens, and provides advice about how to encourage participants to talk comfortably and explain their experiences in detail. Vaillancourt’s study has helped me to think differently about my own professional experiences and to get a feel for the nature of the inquiry that I plan to undertake. Although more background reading on IE is necessary to understand and appreciate the approach, from my perspective as a student, the study provides a very useful model and I recommend it to others who are starting out on their research journey. Campbell, M. & Gregor, F. (2008). Mapping social relations: A primer in doing institutional ethnography. Higher Education University of Toronto Press Inc: Toronto, ON. Smith, D. E. (Ed.) (2006). Institutional Ethnography as Practice. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc: Oxford, UK. Does it get better? --Eric Mykhalovsky reflects on George Smith’s (1998) “The Ideology of Fag” Four years after Canadian sociologist George Smith died, his important article on the school experiences of gay male teenagers was published.* George used the term “ideology of fag” to refer to how gay students and students presumed to be gay became publicly known as “fags” through various forms of verbal abuse, fag baiting, and homophobic graffiti. The ideology of “fag” put in place a sequence of events that led to isolation, ostracism, cruelty and physical violence experienced by the young men identified as “fags.” Conducted 15 years ago, George’s research presaged the current wave of concern precipitated by the suicides of students who have become caught up in what George called the ideology of “fag.” The conclusion to his article gets at the roots of the problem, so often passed over in current responses, including the popular youtube-based “it gets better” campaign. In his words: “The local practices of the ideology of “fag” are never penalized or publicly condemned. Explicit homophobic ridicule in sports contexts goes unremarked. Effective toleration of the ideology of “fag” among students and teachers condemns gay students to the isolation of “passing” or ostracism and sometimes to a life of hell in school…Schools must be held responsible for the arbitrary suffering of gay students as well as for the barrier to education that it creates, at least for those who are driven to the final exclusionary logic of the ideology of “fag.” The experiences of gay students…recorded in this article show schools as complicit in the everyday cruelties of the ideology’s enforcement of heterosexist hegemony. This is a school-created environment and an act of government.” (p. 332) *Smith, G. W. (1998). The ideology of fag: The school experiences of gay students. The Sociological Quarterly, 39(2). Member news Alison Griffith (York University) has been nominated for the position of President Elect of the SSSP. The election will be held early in 2011. The candidate statements and CVs will be available online. Voting will also be done online. Don't forget to vote when the time comes. Mary Hollowell (Clayton State University) is the winner of the 2010 Equity & Social Justice Advocacy Award from the National Association for Multicultural Education (NAME). The award was presented at the NAME 20th International Conference in Las Vegas on November 5. Hollowell received the award for her efforts to end solitary confinement cells in Georgia public schools. New doctoral dissertations Laurie Clune (Ryerson University) --When the Injured Nurse Returns to Work: An Institutional Ethnography Lindsay Kerr (OISE / University of Toronto) --The Educational Production of Students at Risk Gloria Lee (York University) --Fault Line: Educational Discourse and Teachers' Work Welcome to new members Alex Barnes Graham Barnes Cecelia Bonnevie Ferzana Chaze Jean Eells Andre Gaio Lisa Gonzalez Barbara Heather Chrys Ingraham Carl Lacharite Carrie Oelberger Christina Skorobohacz Todd Wolfson Scott Young Research in progress Lauren Eastwood is currently nearing completion of a two-year institutional ethnographic project funded by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). Lauren has attended multiple UN meetings associated with climate, biodiversity, and forests. Her analysis focuses on some key issues that have emerged as being important to members of civil society and indigenous peoples. She has been analyzing the work that people do to influence the policy-making processes, and the implications of certain policy outcomes for various actors. Dorothy Smith and Alison Griffith are part of a research project entitled “Mandated Literacy Assessment and the Reorganization of Teacher's Work”. They will be going to Australia in February to meet with members of the research team and to give workshops and seminars at Monash University, Deakin University, and the University of South Australia. Upcoming IE Workshops in Toronto --by Roxana Ng As the appointed Head of Centre for Women’s Studies in Education (CWSE) at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) since July 2009, I intend to make IE workshops a routine part of CWSE programming. Indeed, we are finalizing our 2011 IE workshop series with Dorothy Smith and Susan Turner as I submit this item to the newsletter. Here is the tentative program. (Dates and titles subject to minor revisions): June 10-12, 2011 IE I: Introductory workshop by Dorothy Smith June 12-16 IE I: Week-long intensive* 1 by Dorothy Smith June 17-19 IE II: Mapping workshop by Susan Turner June 19-23 IE I: Week-long intensive 2 by Dorothy Smith, with Susan Turner August 19-21 IE III: Text in action by Dorothy Smith and Susan Turner *Dorothy requests that we limit each week-long intensive to five spaces (total spaces = ten), so you need to sign up early. The complete details will be announced soon at http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/cwse If you wish to receive news through the CWSE listserv, email Jamie Ryckman, the CWSE coordinator at cwse@utoronto.ca . Alternately, you can check our Face Book page or follow us on Twitter. Stay tuned for more news and be sure to spread the word. NB: For affordable accommodation close to OISE, consider University of Toronto’s St. Michael’s College, which offers a student rate and a cafeteria is on-site. The cost per night of a stay of five days or more is $30.00. http://www.utoronto.ca/stmikes/residence/ IE Workshops: What can you expect? In June 2010, Laura Bisaillon, Liz Brule, Santiago Rincon Gallardo, Chris Langer, Nicole Snow and Roz Stooke attended an introductory workshop and stayed on for a week-long intensive workshop. Laura, Roz and the group offer these thoughts on what to expect if you attend the upcoming IE workshops in Toronto. Introductory Workshop Expect to feel both overwhelmed and excited. You may go home wanting to get straight to work exploring possibilities. But you may want to take time to think and rethink about what you learned. You will receive lots of information ahead of time. The more you read before the workshop, the more you can take from it. Expect to think across disciplines. In our workshop, Dorothy made numerous references to the work of her former graduate students and colleagues. The diversity among topics brought home to us the extent to which IE is a collective project. Participants too came from a variety of fields, including health, community development, education, social work, and women’s studies as well as sociology. Our group included students, activists, researchers and people who were “just curious.” Some participants had travelled from places as far away as Newfoundland, Alberta and Mexico. Expect to make connections with other participants. We had many opportunities and lots of encouragement to share current and planned projects. On Saturday Dorothy sent us off in groups to get lunch together and share ideas which helped the conversation to flow. On Sunday she tried to send us off to lunch, but we wouldn’t stop talking. The Intensive Workshop Expect to write and to talk a lot about your work. An important component of the week-long intensive is exploratory writing. We wrote reflective journals, discussed methodological issues, and met with Dorothy at the beginning and end of each day. In addition to the group discussions, we each had two one-hour individual conferences with Dorothy. Dorothy reassured us that everyone makes progress and she was right. We had lots of opportunities to explain the contours of our inquiries and to clarify them through presentations. The workshop was demanding, but we believe it is well-suited to researchers who are just beginning an IE inquiry. And it wasn’t all about the work. Dorothy does Shakespeare with a wicked Yorkshire accent. At least we think it was Shakespeare. The line-up for Chicago The IE Division will meet in Chicago from August 12-14, 2011. Division members are encouraged to contact session organizers to discuss where and how to include their work in the 2011 annual meeting. Papers are to be submitted directly to the organizers by midnight (EST) on January 31, 2011. Notification of acceptance will be sent by February 15, 2011. Conference, panel, call for papers process, and submission information is available at: http://www.sssp1.org/index.cfm/m/390/pageid/1430/fuseaction/ssspsession2.publicView Sessions sponsored by the IE Division Title: Community Engagement, Activism, and Institutional Ethnography Organizers: Graham Barnes (Battered Women’s Justice Project) gbarnes@bwjp.org and Suzanne Vaughan (Arizona State University) svaughan@asu.edu Since George Smith’s 1990 seminal article in Social Problems on “Political Activist as Ethnographer,” those using institutional ethnography have worked with communities to address justice issues. Ellen Pence’s efforts on behalf of women and children in domestic violence cases best exemplifies this kind of community engagement work and IE’s potential for locating institutional sites of change accessible to those working for justice. Others such as Marie Campbell (people with disabilities and women in development) and Susan Turner (community planning and women and rural development) among many others have begun to extend institutional ethnography as a skill activists can use to undercover the invisible forms of ruling organizing local communities. This session welcomes all community engaged, activist work using institutional ethnography. Title: New Research in Institutional Ethnography Organizers: Naomi Nichols (York University) Naomi_Nichols@edu.yorku and Mandy-Frake Mistak (York University) Mandy_Frake-Mistak@yorku.ca This session invites submissions from people doing institutional ethnographic research across a range of fields: health care, welfare provision, education, social work, policing, grassroots activism, community development, immigration, housing, and so forth. Researchers at various stages of project completion are encouraged to submit applications. We hope that this session includes researchers who are new to this sociological approach as well as well-seasoned institutional ethnographers engaged in new projects. Title: Tables in the Round: Methodological Issues in Institutional Ethnography Organizer: Marj DeVault (Syracuse University) mdevault@syr.edu This session offers an opportunity for institutional ethnographers to discuss issues and challenges of research projects, questions raised by ongoing or completed research, challenges of collaboration, creative strategies for implementing institutional ethnographic projects – or to tell other methodological “tales.” Ideally, papers will include concrete examples of research practice, drawn from specific studies, and also address issues of interest for other researchers. The “Tables in the Round” format indicates that discussion of the papers by an established scholar will be a formal part of the session (and that authors will need to submit papers in advance to our discussant). Co-sponsored sessions Title: Institutional Ethnography and the Social organization of Health Care Organizer: Laurie Clune (Ryerson University) lclune@ryerson.ca Co-sponsor: Health, Health Policy and Health Services Problems associated with the social organization of health care services are receiving increased attention and interest in the research literature and among policy makers. This session welcomes papers that critically examine health care issues and problems and/or explore the social organization of health care from the standpoint of health care workers or patients. Priority consideration will be given to papers that employ an institutional ethnographic approach. Title: Service Workers, Schools, Families and Communities Organizer: Chris Wellin (Illinois State University) cwellin@ilstu.edu Co-sponsor: Youth, Aging, and the Life Course Please contact the organizer for information about this session. Title: Commodification of Care for Seniors and/or Those Living with Disabilities Organizers: Mike Corman (University of Calgary) mkcorman@ucalgary.ca and Chris Wellin (Illinois State University) wellin@ilstu.edu Co-sponsor: Youth, Aging, and the Life Course Please contact the organizer for information about this session. Title: Migration, Work and Racialization: Explorations in Institutional Ethnography Organizer: Roxana Ng (OISE/University of Toronto) roxana.ng@utoronto.ca Co-sponsor: Labor Studies and Racial and Ethnic Minorities Please contact the organizer for information about this session. Title: Critical Analysis of Governance: Institutional Ethnography and Global Studies Organizers: Lauren Eastwood (SUNY Pittsburgh) eastwole@plattsburgh.edu and Lauri Grace (Deakin University) lauri.grace@deakin.edu.au Co-sponsor: Global This session is designed to present research that highlights how an institutional ethnographic framework is being applied to global dynamics. While there has been much recent attention paid to the concept of “governance” in a variety of academic disciplines, this session is intended to highlight the possibilities and problematics that an institutional ethnographic methodology can bring to the analysis. Researchers who use institutional ethnographic methods to analyze global phenomena in a variety of disciplines are encouraged to submit papers. Title: Bending Boundaries: Investigations into the social and textual organization of inequality and mobility work Organizer: Laura Bisaillon (University of Ottawa) lbisa082@uOttawa.ca Co-sponsor: Poverty, Class and Inequality ‘Mobility work’ focuses attention on the activities of people in social margins or contested spaces. Persons with special needs, insecure land tenure, working poor, incarcerated, or student protestors, for example. Through what means are these problems connected to broader institutional and textual processes? Projects in this panel are institutional ethnographies or use methods with aims consistent to IE. Work may explore ‘mobility work’ related to health, sexuality, age, ethnicity, gender, religion, migration, language, or class. For example, papers may map the activities of racialized migrant workers in relation to immigration policy; track the integration work of working class women in the academy; report on the health work of transgendered persons; discuss the negotiating work of an accused before trial; detail the waiting work of displaced persons prior to resettlement. Projects with geographical scopes beyond North America are encouraged. Work that uses IE and projects with aims consistent with IE will be considered. Title: Discovering Translocal Organization: Beyond Micro and Macro Organizer: Peter R. Grahame (Pennsylvania State University) prg11@psu.edu Co-sponsor: Social Problems Theory The range of topics appropriate for this session might include the following: o experiencing, identifying, and representing coordinative practices and extralocal social relations; o resisting and transcending the micro/macro divide in mainstream social sciences; o specifying and reworking the ontology of the translocal in institutional ethnography studies; o responding to/intervening in translocal organization. GEORGE W. SMITH GRADUATE STUDENT PAPER COMPETITION Deadline: May 1, 2011 The IE Division solicits papers for its 2011 George W. Smith Graduate Student Paper Competition. Papers should advance IE scholarship either methodologically or through a substantive contribution. Authors must be currently enrolled graduate students or have completed their degree since September 2010. Prizes include a $100 cash award, registration fees, an opportunity to present the paper at the 2011 SSSP meetings, and a ticket to the SSSP awards banquet. Students who submit papers should be prepared to attend the conference. Send one copy each to Lauren Eastwood eastwole@plattsburgh.edu and Li-Fang Liang lfliang.tw@gmail.com DOROTHY E. SMITH AWARD FOR SCHOLAR-ACTIVISM Deadline: May 1, 2011 The IE Division is pleased to solicit nominations for the 2011 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 Lois Andre-Bechely loisab@calstatela.edu