IMT-PhD: International PhD Summer School 2024

Beskrivelse

Workshop organiser - and paper at the PhD-summerschool, August 2023

Abstract:
In the Nordic countries Institutional ethnography (IE) presents a fairly new approach to qualitative welfare studies ‘from below’. IE is founded by the Canadian critical, feminist sociologist Dorothy Smith with a commitment to do research with people and for people – and see people as knowers of their lives and work - broadly understood.
The intention of much IE is thus to present researchers with a methodology or rather an approach (a sociology) to map the institutional coordination and the ‘ruling relations’ of societal structures and discourses (termed translocal relations) - but as they appear in the everyday lives of people at work or as citizens/clients/users/pupils (etc.) of the institutions in view. Especially in the Nordic context the ambition have often been to present a consistent view on welfare and care provision, with a starting point practices and experiences of the people involved. In line with classical feminist epistemology and activist traditions Smith terms this starting point, a ‘standpoint’. The standpoint in IE-terminology provides the entry point into the inquiry of the institutional coordination of peoples lives and work.
It functions both a theoretical position to relations of power and a methodological starting point from which peoples’ experiences of the ‘problematic’ in their everyday lives and work can be explored.
This paper outlines the basic understandings of this idea of standpoint in the Institutional Ethnographical tradition, while also discussing and challenging the capacity of IE framework and methodology, to further the insights of researchers to gain a more nuanced and perhaps optimistic view of people as knowers and learners dealing with their institutional lives in competent ways. Because IE (in the origin of Smith) is dedicated to being ‘a sociology’ which ‘keeps the institution in view’, I tend to find the perspectives and analyses of people as knowers limited. Thus I will in this paper discuss ways of supplementing vital institutional insights with other understandings and approaches to peoples’ experiences and their ways of dealing with and learning throughout their institutional lives.

Periode	aug. 2024
Begivenhedstype	Seminar
Placering	Roskilde, DanmarkVis på kort
Grad af anerkendelse	International