Institutional Ethnography – A Sociology as, for, and of Resistance

Institutional Ethnography (or IE) is a method of inquiry developed by Canadian Sociologist, Dorothy E. Smith (2005). IE was developed to generate knowledge that is useful to people engaged in the very ordinary work of constituting their everyday lives—particularly as people’s local practices are hooked into trans-local relations of ruling. Despite a history of conducting and using IE scholarship to identify problems with how people’s lives are institutionally organized and to elaborate tangible ways that processes of institutional organization can be challenged and/or resisted, IE has not been widely used to advance the branch of scholarship described as resistance studies. This is a missed opportunity. This article has two objectives: 1. To identify ways for IE to advance the field of resistance studies, and vice-versa for resistance studies to contribute to new applications for IE scholarship; and 2. Clarify how institutional ethnographers might effectively engage with theory so as to forge better scholarly links with resonant scholarly fields (like resistance studies). Drawing largely on my own use of IE within participatory change-oriented research projects, I argue that IE offers resistance scholars essential epistemic, ontological, and ethical foundations from which to pursue collaborative projects that enable evidence-led change efforts as well as the ongoing informal work of supporting one another to strategically navigate and resist the oppressive institutional relations that differentially permeate our lives. At the same time, I signal opportunities for key conceptual resources in resistance studies (i.e., concepts like resistance knowledge or constructive resistances) to be used by IE scholars to think differently about the activist implications of our scholarship