Part 2 Research as Policy Intervention and Critique of Institutions

In this section, attention is turned to how scientific evidence produced through PAE and IE can play a role in changing policy, law, and administrative practices. In “From an Institutional Absence to Radical Action: A Political Activist Ethnography Project in Aotearoa / New Zealand,” Sue Bradford introduces a new way of doing PAE: focusing on research attuned to absences rather than presences. Curious and troubled by the lack of formalized left-wing activism in New Zealand, where she lives, Bradford uses her research to explore the possibilities for formalizing left-leaning activism into think tanks. Bradford chronicles the left in her home country, reflecting on the history of the absence of such a think tank. She imagines what such an organization could possibly look like and consist of.

Erin Sirett’s “North-South Partnership and Capacity Building: Tracing Ruling Relations in the Canadian-Bangladeshi Partnership Between Social Justice NGOs” shows how reporting criteria, rolled out by the international development funding body of the Canadian government, reorganized an existing partnership between organizations operating at the community levels in Canada and Bangladesh. Sirett explores the social relations of funding to show that translocal priorities trumped local priorities and with what effects. She shines a light on the ways in which both organizations took up dominant understandings of “partnership” as manifest in particular ways of transferring funds, circulating ideas, and working.

Laura Bisaillon’s “Mandatory HIV Screening Policy and Everyday Life: A Look Inside the Canadian Immigration Medical Examination” is an institutional and political activist ethnography of HIV-specific practices within the Canadian immigration system’s medical program. Her argument is that mandatory HIV screening triggers institutional practices that are problematic not only for would-be immigrants but also for bureaucrats, doctors, lawyers, and other actors who work for and within the Canadian immigration system. She convinces that public policy and its effects should be investigated from the perspective of the very people toward whom the (in this case, exclusionary) health policy is directed. This work provides a vital corrective to state claims about the functioning of—and the professional and administrative practices supporting—mandatory HIV testing and medical examination, showing how and where things need to change.