Convenors
Morena Tartari, Northumbria University
morena.tartari@northumbria.ac.uk
Órla Meadhbh Murray, Northumbria University
orla.murray@northumbria.ac.uk
Institutional Ethnography (IE) is a sociological approach to research developed by the Canadian sociologist Dorothy Smith (1926-2022) (Smith, 1987, 1990a, 1990b, 2005; Smith, Griffith, 2022). It is a well-established research approach in Canada and the US, with more recent networks of scholars emerging in the Nordic countries, Europe, Taiwan, Australia, and the UK and Ireland (Reid, Russell, 2018; Stanley, 2018; Lund, Nilsen, 2020; Murray, 2022; Luken, Vaughan, 2021; Luken, Vaughan, 2023). This session aims to celebrate the legacy of Dorothy Smith and support the emerging network of IE scholars in Europe, highlighting the value of IE for different academic fields and beyond, including policymakers, activists, and practitioners.
IE is not simply an ethnography of institutions; it is a distinctive approach to research with a specific social ontology, focused on how texts and language organise people’s everyday/everynight lives. Influenced by ethnomethodology, Marx’s materialism, and feminist activism, IE aims to provide a «sociology for people» (Smith, 2005; Smith, Griffith, 2022), investigating how things work and identifying ways to produce change. In IE, «institutional» refers to clusters of textually-mediated social relations which are organised around particular ruling functions such as education, healthcare, and law (Smith, 2005). IE research often involves «mapping» bureaucratic processes in institutions, identifying key discourses and textually-mediated institutional processes and examining how people negotiating these institutional texts and discourses in their everyday reading, writing, and speaking. In IE, discourses are analysed as social relations rooted in materially replicable texts which carry ideas between people and places and organising everyday/everynight life.
This session invites contributions which explore both the theoretical and methodological aspects of IE and showcase IE empirical research across topics and themes, including gender, education, health, social inclusion, inequalities, citizenship, community development, social resilience. Such work is likely to span thematic areas and theoretical/conceptual backgrounds, including sociology of education, sociology of health, criminology and socio-legal studies, sociology of family, sociology of work and professions, gender studies, feminist sociology, intersectionality and decoloniality. We are particularly interested in papers which focus on how IE research can generate and inform social change.
We invite contributors to think about how IE helps to uncover the hidden and often undervalued work of people within institutions and organisations. We also are interested in research that mixes IE with other theories and methodologies, including specific methods of text analysis or creative/participatory methods. We wish to showcase and explore how IE has been used beyond the North American context, considering the challenges and opportunities this presents. Overall, we will consider how IE differs from other forms of ethnographies and the possibilities this provides researchers and users of IE research in trying to understand how thing works and how we might generate social change.
Open questions
- How does IE analyse the (hidden) work of people within institutions and organisations?
- How do Institutional Ethnographers combine IE with other theories and methodologies?
- Which methods are being used by Institutional Ethnographers, particularly around text analysis and creative or participatory methods?
- How has Institutional Ethnography been used beyond the North American context? What challenges and opportunities does this present for Institutional Ethnographers?
- In what ways is IE different from other forms of ethnography?
- What are the recent trends in Institutional Ethnography?
Keywords
social inclusion; inequalities; intersectionality; gender; social change; organisations; Institutional Ethnography.
Sub-disciplines or cross-disciplinary areas of concern
sociology of education; sociology of health; sociology of law; socio-legal studies; criminology; sociology of family; sociology of work and professions; feminist sociology; gender studies; organisation studies.
References
Luken, P.C., Vaughan, S. (Eds.)
2021 The Palgrave Handbook of Institutional Ethnography. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.
2023 Critical Commentary on Institutional Ethnography: IE Scholars Speak to Its Promise. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lund, R.W.B., Nilsen, A.C.E. (Eds.)
2020 Institutional Ethnography in the Nordic Region. London: Routledge.
Murray, Ó.M.
2022 «Text, process, discourse: doing feminist text analysis in institutional ethnography», in International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 25, 1, pp. 45-57. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2020.1839162.
Reid, J., Russell, L. (Eds.)
2018 Perspectives on and from Institutional Ethnography. Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing Limited.
Smith, D.E.
1987 The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
1990a Texts, Facts, and Femininity: Exploring the Relations of Ruling. London: Routledge.
1990b The Conceptual Practices of Power: A Feminist Sociology of Knowledge. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
2005 Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People. Oxford: AltaMira Press.
Smith, D.E., Griffith, A.I.
2022 Simply Institutional Ethnography: Creating a Sociology for People. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Stanley, L.
2018 Dorothy E. Smith, Feminist Sociology & Institutional Ethnography. Edinburgh: X Press.
Convenors’ bios
Morena Tartari (she/her) is Associate Professor of Criminology and Sociology at Northumbria University – Newcastle. She holds a PhD in Sociology (University of Padua, 2012). She has been awarded EU-funded research grants hosted by different universities in different European countries. For instance, in 2019-2021, she was a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research Fellow (MSCA-IF) at the University of Antwerp. Her research focuses on criminological and socio-legal studies, family, gender and inclusion, using a sociological perspective that intertwines Institutional Ethnography and different qualitative methods. She is an active member of several IE research networks (e.g., ISA WG06 Board, ESA 2024 IE Research Stream).
Órla Meadhbh Murray (she/they) is Assistant Professor of Criminology and Sociology at Northumbria University Newcastle and Fellow at the Institute for Medical Humanities, Durham University (UK). They are the co-founder of the Institutional Ethnography Network, regularly run Institutional Ethnography methodology workshops and recently completed the forthcoming (2025) monograph University Audit Cultures and Feminist Praxis: An Institutional Ethnography with Bristol University Press. Her research largely focuses on queer feminist sociology, inequalities in higher education, imposter syndrome, and sociology of the gut. Their next project is called Gut Feelings, taking a queer feminist approach to gut health and mental health.