Institutional Ethnography Newsletter Volume 18. No. 1 Fall/Winter 2020/21 LaNysha Adams Division Chair Edlinguist Solutions lanysha@edlinguist.com Send correspondence to: Gina Petonito WritingYourWay, LLC Correspondence and Copy Editor gpetonito@gmail.com Jayne Malenfant Editor McGill University jayne.malenfant@mail.mcgill.ca On the Inside - Members News & Notes - Call for IE Division Awards - Welcome New Members! - Recent IE Publications -IE Virtual Reading Group -Call for papers and manuscripts -Onward to our virtual meetings From the Division Chair: LaNysha Adam Hello Institutional Ethnographers: To say this year has been tough is an understatement of a lifetime. One thing that is for sure: it has challenged us and pushed most of us out of rock-solid comfort zones. With loss, however, comes greater opportunities for freedom. As we know, freedom isnÕt free - it always comes at cost; just look around at the impact of so much loss from 2020 alone. Be that as it may, I encourage all of us to err on the side of optimism using the adversity we faced to strengthen us for a better tomorrow. We will need it for 2021!Ê Even though we are not meeting in-person at the Annual Meeting, I encourage you to participate virtually. IÕm planning a ÒSuccess SipsÓ session, where we sit with our favorite beverage and toast each other from afar. The IE Workshop is scheduled to occur at an irresistibly affordable cost and will be dynamic and interactive. Hopefully, Season 1 of our IE podcast will be launched by then, too! IÕm excited to report that we will continue our monthly membership meetings where we feature an IE researcher and discuss all things IE, highlighting happenings within and beyond SSSP. I was recently asked what my vision is for IE. My vision for IE scholarship is to see a typology of IE across disciplines, emphasizing that IE is way more than a methodology or even a social ontology. IÕd love folks on the ground to know IE exists as a way to effect transformational change. In September, the Australian Sociological Association titled an IE session as Òconnecting the dots between personal crises and systematic injustices.Ó This is exactly what we do as IE??ers, but its real power lies in the change that can be made after the dots are connected. I want to connect with, honor, and uplift institutional ethnographers as we continue to grow as a field. What is your vision for IE? Onwards and upwards, LaNysha Call for IE Division Awards George W. Smith Graduate Student Paper Competition Deadline January 15, 2021 TheÊInstitutional Ethnography DivisionÊsolicits papers for its 2021 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, seeÊhttps://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 and PDF formats, following the latest APA guidelines. An electronic letter from the studentÕs supervisor attesting to the lead authorÕs 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 2021 SSSP meetings. The winner of the 2021 paper will be invited to sit on the adjudicating panel for the 2022 paper submissions. Please note that any paper submitted for consideration for the George W. Smith Graduate Student Paper Award must also be submitted through the SSSPÊCall for PapersÊto be presented at the 2021 meeting of the SSSP. Send submission to the review committee chair and IE division chair: June Jeon (Committee Chair)Êjjeon24@wisc.eduÊand LaNysha Adams (IE Division Chair)Êlanysha@edlinguist.com. Please be aware that a paper submission may only be submitted to one division. Dorothy E. Smith Award for Scholar Activism Deadline: March 31, 2021 TheÊInstitutional Ethnography DivisionÊis pleased to solicit nominations for the 2021 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 Division to send a one-page statement of the nominee to committee chair, Marjorie DeVaultÊmdevault@maxwell.syr.eduÊby the deadline. Ê MembersÕ News and Notes Jayne Malenfant, Naomi Nichols and Kaitlin Schwan published an article in 2019 titled, Chasing funding to Òeat our own tailÓ: The invisible emotional work of making social change, Canadian Journal of Nonprofit & Social Economy Research / Revue canadienne de recherche sur les OSBL et l'Žconomie sociale. Autumn2019, Vol. 10, p40-54. DOI: 10.29173/cjnser.2019v10n2a307. Naomi NicholsÕ September 2020 talk on Institutional Ethnography for The Australian Sociological Association is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7C6yovK59o&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR0i0tPFFwkT6zoPJXHrs-QnmeTHPDeD9sj885rWJVgMy0evpHgLkaBdB5c Nicole K. Dalmer published an article in 2020 titled: ÒUnsettling Knowledge Synthesis Methods Using Institutional Ethnography: Reflections on the Scoping Review as a Critical Knowledge Synthesis Tool,Ó Qualitative Health Research, https://doi.org/10.1177/1049732320949167 Fiona Webster published a book in 2020 titled: The social organization of best practice: AnÊinstitutional ethnographyÊof physicians' work, Palgrave MacMillan. As one phase of an I.E. research project on technology and the classroom, Aron Rosenberg (MontrŽal) has spent 2020 completely offline. January 1, 2021 at 3 pm EST, Aron will be livestreaming a performance piece on Twitter @Osher. Gina Petonito recently launched her company Writing Your Way. She can help edit your academic and non-academic writing and is planning on launching an online program that will train students to approach self-editing with confidence. Contact her at gpetonito@gmail.com for more information. Paul C. Luken and Suzanne Vaughan edited a volume titled The Palgrave Handbook of Institutional Ethnography. The online version will be available sometime in December while the hardcopy version will be available in early 2021. This project began at an informal dinner in Toronto, Canada during the International Sociological Association World Congress of Sociology in 2018. As we began this project, IE colleagues from SSSP and ISA encouraged and supported us as we assembled the institutional ethnographic work included in this volume. Paul and I learned immeasurably from the authors about the potential of institutional ethnography to show us "how things happen as they do": about the diversity of institutional ethnographic work done in various countries; about the struggles many have faced in maintaining epistemological and ontological commitments as they incorporate other methods or frameworks; about how transnational/global relations organize education, environmental policies and practices, and indigenous and human rights; about how public sector management regimes across different countries and service arenas organized frontline work; and about activists efforts to bring about change within their communities. The volume includes a number of chapters by members of the IE section of SSSP. In this volume some twenty-seven chapters written by thirty-eight contributors address the theoretical richness of institutional ethnography as a mode of inquiry and touch upon the debates inside and outside our field. Here scholars and social activists from Canada, Australia, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, Taiwan, the U.K. and the United States, in sociology and other fields including: geography, politics, education, social work, linguistics, health and medical care, child family studies environmental studies, and other social-service related fields use the ontological insights of institutional ethnography to uncover the social relations shaping the everyday world in which we live Here is a little about the organization of the handbook. Although we recognize that many of the chapters overlap with other sections, the handbook chapters are organized into six sections. Part 1 focuses on the historical and ontological roots of the alternative sociology the in on-going work of Dorothy E. Smith and others. Part 2 is organized around the ways in which institutional ethnographers are developing new research strategies and exploring new challenges as they investigate institutional relations. Part 3 includes chapters whose beginning point is in the local, but move ethnographically to explicate global/transnational ruling relations. Part 4 is about making change in communities. In this section activists/authors discuss the ways in which they use Ellen Pence's Institutional Analysis (Pence and Sadusky, 2005, 2006) and/or George Smith's Political Activist as Ethnographer (Smith, G.1990) to transform people's lives. In Part 5 although authors in this section are inspired by Griffith and Smith's Under New Public Management (2014), many of these chapters written by a new generation of researchers have taken up their investigations in very different settings and entirely new geographical locations. The final section, Part 6, bringing together new approaches and perspectives, includes chapters whose authors have begun to experiment with incorporating other theoretical frameworks with similar epistemological and ontological commitments into their investigations of the social. A word about the cover is warranted here. The handbook is dedicated to the memory of Alison I. Griffith, our first president of the ISA Working Group of Institutional Ethnography. The cover, titled "Walking the Ravines of Toronto," is a drawing by Herbert Hughes, who we asked to produce a sketch of two women walking through a ravine. It is inspired from a quote by Dorothy Smith about the early days of developing a project on mothering work and schooling with Alison. The quote comes from a chapter Dorothy wrote on "Institutional Ethnography" in Tim May's edited volume, Qualitative Research in Action (2002) where she discusses the dialogic nature of inquiry into the social. The chapter ends with further elaboration of terms she uses throughout the chapter. The RAVINES IN TORONTO is one of the terms in the glossary. Here is the quote: ÒOn long walks through the RAVINES IN TORONTO we shared stories of our mothering work, of our children's struggles, of our fear of interfering, of pushing teaches too hard, of not pushing them not hard enough. Our explorations opened up the social relations and organization of schooling as those in relation to which women's work as mothers is done (p. 24).Ó We look forward to the publication of the Handbook and hope that its contents enliven discussion among seasoned IEers and those new to field. [Photo of Paul and Suzanne] The 2008 ISA Forum of Sociology, Barcelona, Spain where Suzanne and Paul gathered ISA member signatures to establish the Thematic Group on Institutional Ethnography. Congratulations Doctor! Cynthia Puddu completed her PhD thesis in Health Promotion and Sociobehaviour Sciences, University of Alberta, in 2020, an institutional ethnography titled The Social Organization of Youth Homelessness in Edmonton, Alberta. Institutional Ethnography Book Series Institutional Ethnography: Studies in the Social Organization of Knowledge New Book Series with University of Toronto Press We live in a world of accelerated interconnection. What we experience as immediate and local experiences and events are connected in myriad ways with activities, technologies, and forms of knowledge that people, not known to us, engage in elsewhere and at other times. Institutional ethnography is an approach to social research that explores this ineluctable translocal nature of our contemporary existence. Institutional ethnography is particularly committed to critical inquiry of ruling relations, conceptualized as that complex of activities and discourses reaching across government, the corporate sector, the mass media, and the professions, among other sites, through which our lives are governed. To explore ruling relations, institutional ethnographers treat language, discourse, and knowledge as social practices and use forms of writing and analysis that preserve the active presence of the experiencing subject. Institutional ethnographic studies explore how ruling relations take shape as peopleÕs translocally coordinated activates and explore how such relations are created and operate, how they affect peopleÕs day-to-day lives, and how they can be transformed. Institutional Ethnography: Studies in the Social Organization of Knowledge is the first book series to curate book manuscripts that showcase research excellence and innovation in the field. The series will be a unique contribution to contemporary knowledge about how ruling relations are organized in our present. It will build on traditions of engaged scholarship to serve as a focal point for scholarly discourse that connects insights about and critiques of the various forms of intersecting knowledge, technologies and practice through which societies are governed. Taken as a whole, the series will critique relations of exclusion, marginalization and oppression, and contribute new perspectives about how they can be altered in pursuit of better futures. The series will publish books that engage in institutional ethnography in a range of ways. Institutional ethnographic studies reporting original research written by senior scholars as well as emerging researchers (including those who have conducted innovative institutional ethnographic Ph.D. research) will be a central thread of the series. Manuscripts by scholars whose work is informed by institutional ethnography will also be included. The series will also consider manuscripts that explore theoretical and methodological issues related to institutional ethnographic inquiry. The series will also consider edited collections with a coherent analytic through line. Series Editor Eric Mykhalovskiy, Sociology, York University, Canada Editorial Board Members Marjorie DeVault (Sociology (Emerita), Syracuse University, USA) Liza McCoy Sociology, University of Calgary, Canada Frank Wang Social Work, National Cheng Chi University, Taiwan Debra Talbot Education, University of Sydney For more information: Eric Mykhalovskiy (ericm@yorku.ca) Jodi Lewchuk, Acquisitions Editor, University of Toronto Press (jlewchuk@utorontopress.com) Recent IE Books and Papers Published A regular feature of the Fall IE Newsletter is to compile a sampling of recent publications involving IE for our members. If you know of any papers, articles or books that you would like to see posted here in future issues, please contact Gina Petonito at gpetonito@gmail.com. Emily Billo, (2020) Gendering indigenous subjects: AnÊinstitutionalÊethnographyÊof corporate social responsibility in Ecuador, Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, Vol. 27, p1134-1154. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2019.1650723 Allyson Ion, (2019) Keeping secrets, disclosing health information: AnÊinstitutionalÊethnographyÊof the social organisation of perinatal care for women living with HIV in Canada, Culture, Health & Sexuality, Vol. 22, p. 429-443. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691058.2019.1604996 Michelle LaFrance, (2019) Institutional Ethnography: A Theory of Practice for Writing Studies Researchers, Utah State University Press. Rebecca W. B. Lund and Ann Christin E. Nilsen, (2019) Institutional Ethnography in the Nordic Region, Taylor & Francis Group. Honggen Xian and Bin Dai, 2020, When truth is power:ÊInstitutionalÊethnographyÊof a think tank, International Journal of Tourism Research, Vol. 22: 438-450. DOI: 10.1002/jtr.2347. Call for Papers Morena Tartari (University of Antwerp, Belgium), and May-Linda Magnussen (Agder University, Norway).Êannounce a call for papers of theÊESA IE Research Stream (RS04) that they are coordinating. Here the link toÊthe list of ESA 2021ÊResearch Streams.Ê https://www.europeansociology.org/about-esa-2021-barcelona/programme It should be updated by ESA 2021 organizers with theÊdescriptionÊof the IE RS.Ê The Call for Papers is planned to be issued by the end of the year 2020.Ê The ESA 2021 Conference will take place either with the full physical co-presence of all attendees, or wholly online, or in some hybrid mode combining these two possibilities.Ê The aim of this RS is to share, discuss, develop and advance the application of IE. The RSÊwill provide a platform for Europe-based researchers, scholars, social activists and students who utilize IE in their research. This stream is also for networking and exchanging experiences with IE scholars outside Europe who will be interested in joining the sessions.Ê The coordinators will do everything possible to organize virtual sessions that allow colleagues fromÊoutside Europe to participate in. Welcome New Members Twelve new members have joined the Institutional Ethnography Division since the publication of our last newsletter. Welcome all! Helen Hudson Shiv Issar Sandra Portocarrero Zakariah Rittenhouse Yasmin Tehrani Robert A. Williams Patricia R. Woods Lee Yeates Kevin Ah-Sen Cansu E. Dedeoglu Cath Jenkins Zoe Sullivan IE Virtual Reading and Study Group Institutional ethnography, an intuitive awakening of the rebel in us. WeÕre scientists, academics, professionals, practitioners. In and beyond our everyday roles, weÕre curious, we observe, we care. Institutional ethnography is the sociology we choose to explore and understand the social. We come together to create a space for learning, understanding, conversing institutional ethnography. We do IE Perspective to read, ask, discuss all about institutional ethnography theory and practice. We have a Facebook group to organize our meetups and keep in touch. But IE Perspective is not another Facebook group to join. IE Perspective is a virtual reading club-and-study group, everyone participates. We have IE Perspective s.log©, a sound blog you can find at podcast networks to listen to sound-recordings of our chats. We also have a (currently) members-only YouTube channel for the video-recordings of our conversations. IE Perspective started in September 2020; itÕs new, dynamic. Our concept is simple; we share a passion and we get to know each other. We have agreed principles for doing IE Perspective. We survey a convenient date and time, and we meet every six weeks or so. A member of the group chooses the text we read, which we use to bring about our conversation. We also discuss our projects, ideas, challenges, plans. We come from around the world. And, itÕs amazing to see people having their breakfast or a break at work, joining from their (home-)office, just finished work, or before going to bed spending time together to learn and help others learn. www: ieperspective.weebly.com s.log (or sound blog): ie perspective s.log© twitter: @IEPerpective facebook: ie.perspective email: the.ie.perspective@gmail.com Call for Papers Below are the IE sponsored or co-sponsored sessions calling for papers for the 2021 SSSP formerly held in Chicago. Please note, the conference will be completely virtual. All papers must be submitted by midnight, January 15, 2021 to be considered for inclusion in the program. To submit, please consult: https://www.sssp1.org/index.cfm/m/838/fuseaction/ssspsession2.publicView Revolutionizing Sociology inÊThe Palgrave Handbook of Institutional Ethnography-THEMATIC Sponsor: Institutional Ethnography Organizers: Paul C. Luken and Suzanne Vaughan New Directions in the Social Organization of Knowledge Sponsor: Institutional Ethnography Organizers:ÊLauren E. Eastwood and Naomi Nichols Ê CRITICAL DIALOGUE: Women and Justice: Rehabilitation, Resistance, Reflexivity and the Self in Institutional Spaces Co-sponsors: Conflict, Social Action, and Change andÊInstitutional Ethnography Organizers: Ebonie L. Cunningham Stringer and Jayne Malenfant Ê CRITICAL DIALOGUE: COVID-19 and the Politics of Education Co-sponsors: Disability, Educational Problems, andÊInstitutional Ethnography Organizers: Kyla Walters, Heather Sue McDonald Rosen, and Rashmee Karnad-Jani Ê Reflexivity and the Self in Institutional Spaces Co-sponsors: Gender andÊInstitutional Ethnography Organizer: îrla Meadhbh Murray Ê Institutional Ethnography and the Epistemologies of the Global South-THEMATIC Co-sponsors:ÊInstitutional Ethnography and Social Problems Theory Organizer: Henry Parada Ê Health Services and Health Policies: Transforming Institutions Co-sponsors:ÊInstitutional Ethnography and Society and Mental Health Organizers: Cathy Ringham and Janet Rankin CRITICAL DIALOGUE: Institutional Ethnography as an Alternative Revolutionary Sociology around the World-THEMATIC Sponsor: Institutional Ethnography Organizers: Ann Christin Nilsen and LaNysha T. Adams Ê Institutional Ethnography in Support of Decolonization-THEMATIC Sponsor: Institutional Ethnography Organizer: Cheryl Zurawski Future Meetings 2022 Annual Meeting Program Theme: TBD August 5-7, 2022 Omni Los Angeles Hotel at California Plaza Los Angeles, CA 2023 Annual Meeting Program Theme: TBD August 18-20, 2023 Philadelphia 201 Hotel Philadelphia, PAÊ