Convenors
Elisa Begnis, HES-SO Valais Wallis
elisa.begnis@hevs.ch
Stefanie Kurt, HES-SO Valais Wallis
stefanie.kurt@hevs.ch
IA welfare agency, a court, a hospital and a migration office share little at first sight in their daily rhythms or mandates. Yet each faces a similar practical problem: complex lives and events must become cases that an institution can act upon. Experiences become accounts, symptoms diagnoses, circumstances converted into eligibility criteria. Rather than treating classification or institutional decisions as isolated moments, this panel takes the movement from lives to cases as an ethnographic object.
Translation, inside and across institutions, is rarely linear. Information is elicited and reformulated, documented and categorized as it circulates, and some is discarded. Every translation entails reduction by actors interpreting rules and exercising discretion under organizational constrints. Meanwhile, people navigating institutions must render themselves and their circumstances institutionally legible. The cumulative outcome of these translations involves a (digital) datification of realities that shape what can be known, what counts as relevant, and which institutional action becomes possible.
Multi-sited ethnography can capture the complexity of these translations by following how definitions are negotiated among caseworkers and institutional actors, to be finally reflected on users. Existing literature has examined institutional classification and frontline discretion, together with the burdens that translation imposes on those who depend on institutions – and, on those who work in them. Less attention has been paid to how these processes connect across sequences of operations through which heterogeneous circumstances are reduced into actionable cases, and to what is preserved, altered or lost along the way. These questions become particularly salient as institutional processes are increasingly bureaucratised and datafied, with consequences for access, discretion and fairness.
The panel therefore welcomes contributions that follow case-making across welfare, healthcare, justice, migration, policing and other institutional settings. We are especially interested in how formal categories interact with situated judgement, and in how organizational infrastructures mediate institutional action. This also shapes assumptions about what institutions recognize as normal, and what they deem deserving of action. Decision-making, in this sense, is a relational process that emerges from ongoing exchanges among caseworkers and users, as well as from categories and technologies they draw upon, this raises the question of how to analyse and make sense of it.
Bringing different fields into conversation, the panel asks how institutions turn complex and often ambiguous social realities into cases on which they can act. What happens in this transformation? What becomes relevant, what disappears, whose work makes the case possible, and how does the case that emerges shape what the institution can ultimately do?
Open questions
- What can comparison across institutional fields reveal about the transformations through which institutions make social realities actionable?
- What happens to lives, experiences and events as they are transformed into institutional cases?
- How do different institutions decide what becomes relevant, legible and actionable, and what remains outside the case?
- How do categories, documents, procedures, technologies and professional judgement interact in the making and processing of cases?
- What kinds of work and administrative burden are produced through these transformations, and how are they distributed between those who work within institutions and those who depend on them?
- How are processes of case-making reshaped by bureaucratisation, digitalisation and datafication?
Keywords
Institutional ethnography, Multi-sited ethnography, Discretion, Datafication, Administrative burden, Case-making, Translation processes
Sub-disciplines / cross-disciplinary areas
Sociology of organisations, Feminist and gender studies, Social work research, Public administration and policy studies, Policing, Health, disability and care studies, Migration and border studies
References
Baekgaard, M., Moynihan, D. P., & Thomsen, M. K. (2021). Why Do Policymakers Support Administrative Burdens? The Roles of Deservingness, Political Ideology, and Personal Experience. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 31(1), 184–200. https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muaa033
Brodkin, E. Z., & Majmundar, M. (2010). Administrative Exclusion: Organizations and the Hidden Costs of Welfare Claiming. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 20(4), 827–848. https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/mup046
Gupta, A. (2013). Messy bureaucracies. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 3, 435–440. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.14318/hau3.3.029
Hannerz, U. (2003). Being there… And there… And there!: Reflections on Multi-Site Ethnography. Ethnography, 4(2), 201–216. https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381030042003
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford University Press.
Lipsky, M. (2010). Street-level bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the individual in public services. Russell Sage Foundation.
Tabin, J.-P., Piecek-Riondel, M., Perrin, C., & Probst, I. (2016). L’invalidité comme catégorie administrative. Revue Suisse de Pédagogie Spécialisée, 3, 13–19.
Convenors’ bio
Dr. Elisa Begnis is a post-doctoral researcher at HES-SO Valais/Wallis, and a sociologist specializing in institutional violence, policing and street-level bureaucracy. Her doctoral research examined policing in the Italian context, at the intersection of abuse of power, migration, gender and perceptions of weapon, before turning to gender-violence and policing in everyday police practices. She is currently studying institutional architecture and its consequences in Switzerland’s Disability Insurance framework. She teaches Criminology and Sociology of Deviance in Social Work, aiming to connect research with the everyday practice of future practitioners, carrying academic work into the field.
Stefanie Kurt (Dr. iur.) is Full Professor at HES-SO Valais/Wallis and a legal scholar specializing in migration, integration, religion, and human rights law. Her interdisciplinary research examines the intersections of law, social work, and social policy, with particular attention to migration governance, citizenship, integration policies, social rights, and fundamental rights in Switzerland and Europe. She has led and contributed to numerous national and international research projects and publishes widely on migration and integration law. Her work combines socio-legal research with a strong engagement in interdisciplinary collaboration, knowledge transfer, and dialogue between academia, professional practice, and wider society.