Materialist Matters: A Case for Revisiting the Social Ontology of Institutional Ethnography

McCoy, Liza

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-54222-1_3

Cited by 17 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…In IE, reflexivity refers to the “interactive and mutually determined character of the social world and the knowledge produced about it” (Bisaillon, 2012, p. 618). Practicing reflexivity helped me assess whether I was thinking and doing research in alignment with IE’s social ontology, including not reproducing problematic discourses that objectify people (Ion, 2021; McCoy, 2021). Concerning positionality, I am a thin cis white able-bodied woman.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reflections on Applying Institutional Ethnography in Participatory Weight Stigma Research with Young Women

Ferdinands

McHugh

Storey

et al. 2022

International Journal of Qualitative Methods

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Inspired by consciousness-raising practices of North American second-wave feminism, Dorothy Smith developed institutional ethnography (IE) as an alternative to established sociology, which she argued objectified people and their experiences. Instead, IE begins from an embodied standpoint to examine how local phenomena are coordinated to happen by ruling relations from afar. In this article, we present methodological insights from our experiences of applying IE, informed by principles of participatory research, in Alberta, Canada to examine the challenges young women (aged 15–21) in larger bodies face while navigating their everyday lives. We begin by exploring current discussions in the burgeoning field of IE, including how IE’s social ontology aligns with participatory approaches to research. Contextualized by our public health backgrounds, we then describe how we used IE to study how the work of growing up in a larger body is socially organized, interpreting work generously as any task requiring thought and intention. Between March-December 2019, we conducted 14 individual interviews and facilitated 5 working group meetings with a subset of interview participants. Discussions during the working group meetings were structured by an adapted critical analysis framework to prompt participants in questioning taken-for-granted assumptions around weight and health. As part of this working group, we developed knowledge mobilization materials (infographics and an open letter) for parents, educators, and healthcare providers about how to navigate weight-related issues with young people, grounded in participants’ experiential knowledge. We specifically reflect on how IE was a valuable tool for addressing four principles of participatory research central to this study: go beyond “do no harm”; provide opportunities for giving feedback; create space for critical engagement; and bring knowledge mobilization to the fore. Overall, our experiences suggest value in IE as a pragmatic, flexible approach to public health research, offering unique methodological tools which keep research participants in view.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reflections on Applying Institutional Ethnography in Participatory Weight Stigma Research with Young Women

Ferdinands

McHugh

Storey

et al. 2022

International Journal of Qualitative Methods

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…IE's social ontology (McCoy, 2021) affords a view of people's work as interconnected and mutually constitutive social practices. With the materialist view of social life that IE puts forward, we come to see our teaching, learning, research, and activist trajectories as "socially organized practices of coordination" (p. 35) that are shaped by and shaping the spaces, curricula, research designs, discourses, and ideas we encounter and navigate in our work together.…”

Section: Mots-clés Ethnographie Institutionnelle éDucation Des Adulte...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Participatory Action Research, Critical Adult Education, and the Work of D.E. Smith for Research Praxis

Malenfant,

Nichols

2024

CJSAE

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From 2017-2021, the Youth Action Research Revolution (YARR) team documented the institutional histories of young people experiencing homelessness in Canada. Interviews with youth focused on educational, child welfare, healthcare, and criminal justice institutions. Situated at the intersections of critical adult education (CAE), participatory action research (PAR), and Institutional Ethnography (IE), we outline our mobilization of IE to ground learning and action within our team. We document the different phases of learning that we undertook, as a means of illustrating how CAE, PAR, and IE can be mutually supportive frameworks for praxis and activist learning. We highlight our use of IE to bring illuminate and resist the institutionalizing processes at work in post-secondary contexts and reflect on the importance of mutual aid as essential to realizing the social justice potential of participatory research. We suggest that co-creating IE research with young adults with lived experiences of homelessness constitutes a unique opportunity to mobilize CAE values and tangibly support community research that seeks to positively influence the lives of those implicated by the problems we study together.

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“…Some of these translocal relations can be a form of ruling relations that do not originate yet must be interpreted and enacted in a specific local setting where people are held accountable to them. 4 People thus navigate between their material bodily being in the world and the textual realities that human activities in language produce (see McCoy 2021;Smith , 2005). People's lives, experiences, and locations in social relations mean there will be disagreement, different readings and senses of relevance.…”

Section: Smith's Materialism and Understanding Of Languagementioning

confidence: 99%

Retrieving Materialism: The Continued Relevance of Dorothy Smith

Lund

2023

Sociological Theory

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In this article, I argue that Smith’s continued relevance coincides with more recent retrievals of Marx-inspired materialism. This materialism and the associated understanding of human beings—the social, language, and world people share in common—certainly do not capture all there is to say about Smith’s eclectic and expansive social theory. However, the material dimension distinguishes her work from many other feminist sociologies and results in her continued relevance as a thinker who brings to the table another way of doing feminist sociology. I illustrate this by showing how Smith’s Marx-inspired materialism and its associated understanding of language offer a productive and timely alternative to the feminist social theory of anti-categorical intersectional theory and new materialist theory.

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Materialist Matters: A Case for Revisiting the Social Ontology of Institutional Ethnography

Cited by 17 publications

References 11 publications

Reflections on Applying Institutional Ethnography in Participatory Weight Stigma Research with Young Women

Reflections on Applying Institutional Ethnography in Participatory Weight Stigma Research with Young Women

Participatory Action Research, Critical Adult Education, and the Work of D.E. Smith for Research Praxis

Retrieving Materialism: The Continued Relevance of Dorothy Smith

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