Introduction Institutional Ethnography and Political Activist Ethnography in Context

Agnieszka Doll, Laura Bisaillon, and Kevin Walby

How can research help produce knowledge for oppressed peoples, activism, and social reform? This question forms the backbone of this edited collection. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed global problems related to deepening social inequalities, environmental degradation, racial oppression, political polarization, and right-wing nationalism. As activists strategize, build resistance, and advance solidarity, they also make appeals for deeper relations between academic researchers and those engaged in social movements and for research that can enhance their struggle (Burnett and Ross 2020; Matthews 2020; Chattopadhyay, Wood, and Cox 2020). The body of work contained between these covers contributes to these mobilizations by reporting on the research results of political activist ethnographers and institutional ethnographers from Aotearoa (New Zealand), Bangladesh, Canada, Poland, and the United States. These examples illustrate how activist-oriented researchers have worked from places of struggle and produced practical guidance for advancing social reform.

Political activist ethnography (PAE) is a form of critical materialist social science inquiry closely related to institutional ethnography (IE): an approach pioneered by Canadian sociologist Dorothy E. Smith in The Everyday World as Problematic (1987). IE emerged from her involvement in feminist critique and activism, whereas PAE evolved from the activist work of Canadian sociologist George W. Smith (the same last name is a coincidence), active in Canadian gay liberation and AIDS community work. They worked together and developed these approaches during their tenure as colleagues at the University of Toronto. IE examines how oppression is embedded and reproduced in and through the social relations that organize institutions, focusing on how texts mediate these relations. In the article “Political Activist as Ethnographer,” George Smith (1990) builds on Dorothy Smith’s thinking to lay the foundation for a new research strategy that he intends to be valuable for those involved in social activism, which later comes to be known as political activist ethnography (Frampton et al. 2006). This approach uses “political confrontation as an ethnographic resource” (G. Smith 1990, 629), focusing on moments and places of direct struggle to reveal how ruling regimes are organized so activists can fight them. Yet for knowledge to be helpful for people in mobilizing against those in power, it must be generated from the starting point of these people’s position in the world, from their actualities and practices, and grounded in their daily lives. PAE and IE thus adopt a “bottom-up” approach to inquiry to produce knowledge for rather than about people—for activists, not about activists. They both turn the power of ethnography against the ruling institution to create knowledge for those who are oppressed (Kinsman, chapter 2 in this volume). These properties are some of the most important that distinguish PAE and IE from other politically engaged ethnographies, such as militant ethnographies (Lyon-Callo and Hyatt 2003; Shukatis and Graeber 2007), community-based participatory action research (Nichols, Griffith, and McLarnon 2017), or critical ethnographies of political activism (Hansen 2021).

Hence, our volume has two main objectives. The first is to popularize PAE as a research strategy for movements and mobilizations for social change and justice. Inspired by Sociology for Changing the World (Frampton et al. 2006), our collection illustrates a wide range of ways that researchers, who are variously situated inside and outside academia, can take up PAE or IE to produce knowledge that can be useful for activists in their pursuit of direct struggle or social reform. Contributors to this book explore from the bottom-up such topics as anti-poverty organizing, former prisoners’ re-entry into society, pro-environmental anti-fracking campaigns, left-inspired think-tank development, non-governmental partnerships, state mental health adjudications, and immigration medical services. They provide examples of activist research as the sociology of confrontation and intervention and invite other activists or activist scholars to further probe ways of understanding the relationship among activism, research, and scientism. Such probing can open activist research to new possibilities as well as foster innovative ways of doing PAE and IE.

The second objective is to challenge the traditional academic understanding of what activist research is. George Smith writes that research can be activism, and activism can be research (G. Smith 1990; Hurl and Klostermann 2019). This idea emphasizes the connection between politically grounded research and activism and suggests that research (broadly understood and practiced) can be a productive site of activist activity. Resistance is a political act, and researching for resistance can be a political act. What becomes visible across the contributions in our volume is that dismantling the academic activist divide is neither easy nor without dangers when academic research standards start to colonize and substitute grassroots modes of doing research. For example, this caveat becomes particularly visible in Aziz Choudry’s (chapter 4) contribution when he points to how activism as research becomes hierarchically organized and differently valued even in grassroots activism, where academic research standards are adopted. These hierarchies can also manifest subtly: through the resources and language we use to frame (Walsh, chapter 10) and write up research, where we seek out and secure funding, or in what strings are then attached to research monies (see Sirett, chapter 6). Thus, this book provides practical insights into how PAE and IE can be used in research for activism while raising questions about power relations in academia.

Before we turn to the themes of this volume, we address some premises of both IE and PAE to demonstrate their uniqueness as research strategies for activists and social movements. Doing so will help establish common grounds and vocabulary for readers, especially those new to IE and PAE. Given that PAE requires an understanding of IE, it is essential to explore IE first.

Dorothy Smith and Social Inquiry

IE emerged from Dorothy Smith’s contestation of knowledge production in academia and her activism in the context of education. She reflected on a disjuncture experienced between the life she lived as a mother and the social world of the academic sociologist, in which she engaged as a part of her work. She observed that when sociologists impose an overly predetermined theoretical framework for interpreting people’s lives, they restrict their inquiry and the knowledge they produce from how actual lives are experienced (D. Smith 2007, 409). In such sociological theorizing, people “become the object of investigation and explanation” instead of being treated as knowers (D. Smith 2005, 22). Even methods developed as alternatives to traditional social inquiry, such as feminist ones, can be guilty of these forms of theory-based objectification. When knowledge has no connection to people’s actual experiences, it holds little promise in helping them understand the origins of the tensions and contradictions they encounter.

Working from the idea that “people must be viewed as experts on the conditions of their own lives” (Walby 2013, 143), IE is committed to creating knowledge that can show where organizations erase the experiences of the people they serve. Thus, IE proposes an alternative way of producing sociological knowledge. For it to be relevant, sociology must ground itself in knowledge produced and held directly by the knower. IE “begins with some issues, concerns, or problems that are real for people and that are situated in their relationship to an institutional order” (D. Smith 2005, 32). For instance, Ellen Pence (2001), an advocate for women abused by their partners in the United States, used her knowledge of advocacy for women with experiences of gender violence to investigate how concerns about these women’s safety disappear during their abusers’ criminal processes. This example demonstrates how people’s social experiences and material realities are a “ground zero of the analysis” in IE (as well as in PAE) to understand how ruling relations and ideological regimes organize those experiences (Campbell 2006, 91).

This is a sociology for people, as it aims to produce knowledge that will help people understand how various institutions—such as law, health, education, and social services—shape their lives and the difficulties they experience. As IE proceeds “from where actual people are in their own lives, activities, and experiences,” it does so “to open up relations and organizations that are, in a sense, actually present in them [in these activities and experiences] but not observable” (D. Smith 2006, 4; also see Luken and Vaughan 2021). In this way, IE is a sociology not about people but for people. With such knowledge of how their lives are organized in a way that is oppressive, people can know how and where to confront ruling regimes. Institutional ethnographers identify the social hierarchies, discourses, workplace procedures, and administrative policies that configure and control people’s everyday world by gathering and analyzing knowledge founded directly in their lived experiences (Luken and Vaughan 2023; D. Smith and Griffith 2022). To instigate change, IE expands people’s knowledge by investigating and explicating how their lives are socially organized.

For institutional ethnographers, ruling relations are objectified forms of knowledge and coordinated forms of social organization (D. Smith 2005, 227; Luken and Vaughan 2021). They are translocal or coordinated across time, and their “objectivity” relies on the ability to abstract, categorize, standardize, and administer. Ruling relations depend on the circulation and reproduction of texts (written, printed, electronic, video, and audio) and their standardizing messages. Textually mediated forms of social organization have dominated for the last two hundred years (D. Smith 2005, 227). Dorothy Smith developed the concept of textually mediated social organization “to express the notion that engagement with texts concerts and coordinates people’s actions” (Campbell and Gregor 2004, 29). Abstracting, standardizing, and generalizing are inherent outcomes of working with institutional texts such as forms, policies, guidelines, and reports. She refers to these textually mediated processes as “conceptual practices of power” that are not “neutral” and do not produce “neutral” consequences (D. Smith 1990, 2005).

When people’s lives are packaged into categories, abstractions, and generalizations, the embodied disappears under institutional categories and terminology. These social relations of knowledge production reflect and reinforce dominant power structures (D. Smith 1990). Those practices can be seen vividly in Gary Kinsman’s (chapter 2) illustration of how sorting people who are recipients of public welfare programs into institutional categories precludes some people from accessing benefits needed for their survival and reinforces divisions among different categories of recipients of disability assistance. Some people are subsequently ordered as the “deserving” or “undeserving” poor. Indeed, those categories and, more broadly, ruling relations govern and organize institutional encounters between those invested with power to “serve” and those who are “served.” For those who “serve” (as an extension of various institutions such as the criminal system, social welfare, health, or immigration services), people become expressions of organizational categories, which are naturalized, divorcing institutional actions from the priorities and needs of people these institutions serve (see Deveau, chapter 3; Bisaillon, chapter 7; and Doll, chapter 9).

George Smith and Social Reform: Political Activist Ethnography

Because of the potential for change at the level of bureaucracies and agencies, IE has appealed to practitioners and is used by frontline workers in various bureaucratic milieus. George Smith’s PAE provides a more specific grounding for activists and social movements. This is an activist subfield of IE that was given the name “political activist ethnography” in the edited volume entitled Sociology for Changing the World (Frampton et al. 2006). PAE projects maintain the commitments of IE while proposing an approach to research that intends to produce knowledge for activists based on their struggles (Bisaillon 2012, 617; 2020; 2022). The development of PAE stemmed from George Smith’s activist and research work. During the 1980s, he studied criminal justice and medical regimes’ organization to benefit those who, like himself, were involved in direct action and other forms of organizing.

Smith’s early work on policing gay men in Toronto explored how politico-ideological ruling regimes socially organized the policing of sexual activities in public bathhouses. He described how the Canadian Criminal Code provisions and legal documents organized the police’s documenting practices. He read these texts for the social organization of the mandated course of action and evidence gathering for the bawdyhouse-related offences that converted sexual conduct into criminal activity. He provided a basis for activists to focus on Criminal Code changes instead of individual police officers’ outreach and education. Smith was also involved as a member and researcher of a community-based activist group from Toronto—AIDS ACTION NOW!—to contest “government and medical inaction around HIV/AIDS in the 1980s” (AIDS Activist History Project, n.d.). His study revealed how the lack of mandate and infrastructure for delivering experimental drugs to people with AIDS produced institutional absences in that case (AIDS Activist History Project, n.d.).

One of the political commitments that George Smith carried forward as an institutional ethnographer doing activist work is embodied and situated research. He and other political activist ethnographers assert that only research grounded in the actualities of activists engaged in a political struggle can enable an understanding of how activist struggle is socially organized (Kinsman, chapter 2). PAE starts with activists’ experiences and adopts a standpoint of people making change, working from that site to understand how the struggle is organized to enable strategic next steps in activism. In other words, it “interrogates institutional relations from the vantage point of social movements that confront them and maps out the social relations of the struggle facing these movements so they can grasp how to transform the relations they find themselves fighting” (Kinsman in Bisaillon 2012, 617). Confrontations with the state can be seen as an entry point to explore how government, domestic and transnational capital, and other extra-local forces socially organize power, as manifested through the work in this book. By conceptualizing, harnessing, and mobilizing confrontation, including direct action tactics, and researching ruling regimes, activist researchers can understand how they operate and then how to resist them.

During blockades and protests, intentional disruptions of the political and economic order can expose ruling practices against which activists struggle. By analyzing moments of confrontation and the disruptions that they trigger, activists and researchers can piece together how power operates. Such research can equip those on the frontlines of contestation “with a more direct orientation towards social change” (AIDS Activist History Project, n.d.), as PAE investigates observable rather than abstract cases of ruling. PAE can help to train social movements and activists to identify and act on the ways that their thinking and actions are socially organized and to use these insights to achieve specific change.

Furthermore, a political activist ethnographer would reject abstract conceptual explanations or speculative accounts of why and how things seem to happen as they do. According to some gay rights activists in the 1980s, the explanation for why gay men in bathhouses in downtown Toronto were arrested was that “police are homophobic” (G. Smith 1990). Yet such an explanation provided activists with little understanding of how and where to proceed with activism. It requires that a researcher make a shift from what George Smith (1990, 633) describes as a “generalized world of conceptual and theoretical explanations to the concrete, sensuous world of people’s actual practices and activities.” While police officers might well have been homophobic, the point is to understand ruling and know where to intervene to mitigate harm; speculative explanations are not helpful because they do not address how oppression happens through mundane policing practices. It is crucial to reveal the specificities of how ruling happens in the work of police officers, for example. When directed at agencies, activism must be grounded in a detailed understanding of how these agencies operate, including their internal operations, external interactions, assumptions, and goals that guide their priorities and actions. Before activists can modify institutions, they “must be able to see how they are put together in time, and this means explicating text-mediated, trans-local relations as accomplished by people in particular local sites and seeing how they are hooked (and objectified) into larger organizational processes” (Dobson 2001, 154). Political activist research can unpack these practices and the ruling relations that govern them.

Lastly, while it is vital to critique the ruling regimes that activists face, activists must understand the ruling regimes that organize their work to resist them. Hussey (2012) argues that neither activists nor social movements are immune from being governed by ruling relations. Activists may have their perspectives embedded in the officialdom of a particular organization. Focusing on his personal involvement in fair trade anti-sweatshop lobbying in Vancouver, British Columbia, he advances the idea that activist projects can hook activists into institutional regimes and officially authorized forms of knowledge. While activists might be able to challenge some ruling perspectives and confront ruling regimes, these are the same relations that organize their work priorities and those of the movements with which they are aligned. Grassroots activists can take up this line of thinking when it comes time to decide whether or on what conditions to acquiesce to or resist a movement’s priorities. Further, it offers new knowledge for activists about managing tensions between grassroots activists and movement institutions. This brings us to the practice of PAE and its relationship to research.

Practicing Political Activist Ethnography

PAE is by no means a one-size-fits-all approach to activist inquiry. It is open-ended in terms of research directions and is guided by research problematics that emerge from the everyday realities of activists and social movements. It offers an opportunity for methodological flexibility to deal with an unexpected scale and complexity of data.

The authors of the chapters ahead ask questions about the social organization of the following: mobilizing in the interest of poor people, prisoners’ re-entry into society, troubling results of practices in the fracking industry, envisioning left-leaning think tanks, partnerships between government and civil society groups, mental health law for psychiatric patients, medical and administrative decision-making in immigration systems, and activist scholarship inside and outside the academy. Below, we outline some unifying empirical, conceptual, and methodological interventions that this text makes to activist struggle and research.

Activist Research Inside/Outside Academia

In this volume, one thing the authors do is share activist research that informs their advocacy. The work of A. J. Withers (chapter 1), Gary Kinsman (chapter 2), Jean Louis Deveau (chapter 3), the late Aziz Choudry (chapter 4), and Sue Bradford (chapter 5) is representative of this outside-of-academia trajectory that began in these authors’ prior experiences of doing activist work. Withers and Kinsman are both political activist ethnographers. They use their experience working with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty to illustrate on-the-ground strategies that activists employ in their work. Kinsman discusses the value of conceptualizing direct action and direct support work as valuable sources of data and shows how research that goes into mobilizing allows activists to focus on and prepare for future interventions. Withers points to how figuring out questions, requesting documents, and reviewing them informed the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty’s actions. Choudry, as well, was an activist before becoming an academic, and his work explores activist researchers, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and people’s organizing that evolve in activist milieus off the university campus. He problematizes a hierarchy of knowledge that locates activist grassroots organizations’ research on a lower rung than the projects carried out by academics and persons within NGOs. He calls for the recognition of intellectual work done by activists to dislocate the idea that research education, training, and mentorship are within the exclusive purview of the university. Grounded in collective efforts with his activist colleagues, Deveau has penned a narrative about how anti-fracking activism happened across time and place. He analyzes how a New Brunswick coalition to which he belonged opposed the growth of the shale gas industry and its intensification by mobilizing specific types of scientific knowledge in distinct ways. Bradford arrived at her problematic from her long-term engagement as a left-leaning activist in Aotearoa (New Zealand). Her chapter is a compelling analysis of the absence of a left-wing think tank, and her work offers ideas about how to develop such a community of practice.

Examples of activist research that started inside academia are showcased in the chapters by Erin Sirett (chapter 6), Laura Bisaillon (chapter 7), Megan Welsh Carroll (chapter 8), and Agnieszka Doll (chapter 9). Welsh Carroll developed an IE-infused advocacy orientation to explore the work involved for incarcerated women exiting prison and re-entering dominant society. She accompanied her participants to administrative appointments in various governmental offices, learning alongside them how women needed to advocate in their subjective interests to get social and legal entitlements. She has presented an approach to fieldwork that infiltrates institutional sites of oppression to challenge them. Doll’s research into the social organization of involuntary admission in Poland was motivated by the procedural and practical inadequacy she observed as a lawyer. She explores the social organization of the involuntary admission procedure that keeps admittees silent despite their legal right to participate in their admission’s legal adjudication and contest it. Sirett used IE to explore the social relations that organized a connection between the Bangladeshi grassroots organization and Canadian non-governmental organization’s partnership along with textually mediated rulings by funding agencies. Bisaillon blends IE and PAE to investigate the social organization of the Canadian immigration system’s medical program from the standpoint of people with HIV as they apply for permanent residency, making empirically supported recommendations for institutional reform. In these studies, advocacy occurs directly within the context of the authors’ research or research is done to interrogate policy so activists and social movements can adjust their strategy.

These accounts of organizing and activism further complicate the academic activist divide constructed in university disciplines and reveal its limits when applied to politically engaged research undertaken from inside and outside academia. Authors in this volume also bring to our attention the fact that academic standards of validity do not resonate with how activists understand knowledge. According to Kinsman, the defining criterion for successful activist research is whether it provides a foundation for organizing based on an analysis of how ruling relations are organized. This is a much higher test than in regular academic research, since the direction of people’s struggles depends on it. Choudry raises an essential question of whether knowledge is only valued if people with qualifications and status produce it in specific institutional settings. He rightly observes that the subjugation of activist knowledge, specifically grassroots activists, not only is happening in academia but also penetrates social movements themselves. For more professionalized NGOs, grassroots knowledge production may be seen as invalid when the former internalizes the conception of a professional researcher as an expert and of academic research standards (see chapter 10 by Walsh).

Means, Methods, and Modes of Inquiry

PAE’s methodological flexibility also enables it to deal with an unexpected scale and complexity of data. Yet by no means are PAE and IE one-size-fits-all approaches to inquiry. This volume showcases PAE and advocacy-infused IE projects’ diversity in the methods and modes that researchers deploy to produce activist knowledge. While some contributors adhere to the methodological guidance of PAE and IE, others adapt these to fit their research needs. Kinsman and Deveau (chapters 2 and 3, respectively) use direct action as activist research, such as occupying decision-makers’ offices, protesting in and outside buildings, participating in and disrupting consultation meetings, and bringing crowds to official meetings to pressure those in power to make concessions or implement change. An intentional disruption of the social order by an academic activist (“breaching” project) can help reveal the social organization of a ruling practice that activists struggle against and produce knowledge grounded in the actualities of their everyday struggles.

Frontline support work is another form of research for activism and social movements in which researchers may want to engage in deriving the benefits of direct experiential knowledge. It can involve taking on the grievances of individuals living in poverty as group grievances, accompanying people to appointments with social assistance workers to apply pressure, or writing letters (Withers, chapter 1; Kinsman, chapter 2; Welsh Carroll, chapter 8). Welsh Carroll volunteered for a community-based organization working with formerly incarcerated women to learn how the post-carceral reintegration system operates from the standpoint of women subjected to it. Seeing the limited resources of community-based providers at their disposal, she filled this gap by providing day-to-day services, such as driving women to appointments, supporting them psychologically and emotionally, and keeping them calm when they were frustrated with the treatment received from service institutions. She also mapped “moments of confrontations” as they appeared in the interactions between women and people working in social assistance agencies. Welsh Carroll might not have had the opportunity to pinpoint and analyze these points of rupture if not for this support work. Yet what seems to make sense in one activist context may not migrate so well into another context, or the work might need to take a different form. While Kinsman, in alliance with the Sudbury Coalition Against Poverty, and Welsh Carroll both were working on the side of dispossessed people in the hopes of availing them of services, Kinsman and colleagues took their intervention a step further by “applying pressure through mobilizing people.”

Contributors also read institutional texts critically to learn about institutional processes to map ideological accounts and ruling relations. Deveau discusses his provincial government’s fracking policy and its observable consequences. His meticulous reading of changes to policy and subsequent analyses shaped how he and his colleagues proceeded to resist. He describes how reports that he and his colleagues presented through the government’s public consultation exercise on fracking were subsumed by officially commissioned reports about the consultation process. Doll reads professional and research regulations to understand how they work together to limit the extent to which direct intervention was permissible. Sirett reads documents for organizing the partnership between two activist NGOs, while Bisaillon engaged with documents on immigration HIV testing for how they compel contract physicians to become state agents rather than care providers. Moreover Kinsman’s and Deveau’s chapters illustrate how activists can apply a strategy coined by George Smith as “document and demonstrate,” bringing together analysis and writing texts with direct action to pressure those in power to respond to activists’ demands expressed in texts.

Furthermore, a contribution of this volume is the emphasis on mapping social relations and even movements. For Kinsman, mapping is a part of PAE—informing its theorizing and practice. Welsh Carroll visualizes macro-social maps of economic, political, legal, and social relations that organize formerly incarcerated women’s access to resources. She argues that such maps bring into view multiple opportunities for action and can be a resource for prison activist organizations that help them focus on policy change and for advocates or workers to call for resources to aid the re-entry work of their clients. Mapping can also help debunk the myth that those hurdles are people’s fault, as it makes institutional causes visible (Kinsman 2011a, 2011b; Doll and Walby 2019). While perplexed by the absence of formalized left-wing activism in her home country, New Zealand, Bradford uses her research to explore and map the feasibility of formalizing left-wing activism by establishing a major left-wing think tank. Our contributors also showcase how to use mapping in the context of Hussey’s (2012) idea of extended PAE. Here, mapping involves tracing not only the ruling relations against which these movements fight but also those that contain resistance and shape movement capacities both positively and negatively. Such an “inside-in” mapping can help activists locate themselves within the web of relations, identify weak links, and find ways to forge alliances to advance political goals.

Lastly, this collection complicates the binaries between knowledge production and knowledge mobilization. Many of the chapters bring into view the relationship between knowledge production and knowledge mobilization in the context of political activist ethnographies and IE-infused advocacy projects. Activist research is an ongoing process, not like a traditional academic modelling of research projects. This again points to the fact that activism and research remain in a dynamic and reflexive relation, and this is explored across the chapters when the authors showcase the diversity of approaches in IE and PAE toward the mobilization of knowledge for the sake of social struggle.

Conclusion

As readers engage with the material presented in this collection, they will notice multiple tensions that authors bring to the forefront as well as those that emerge across chapters. Multiple tensions emerge from within the authors’ experiences of doing their PAE and advocacy-inspired IE research. These tensions vary from how to read state documents and interpret technical “state speak” (Kinsman, chapter 2) to how to navigate ethical dilemmas (Doll, chapter 9) and write in a way that is accessible to activists. One of the tensions spanning across the chapters is between activism and professionalism. In IE, tensions, specifically those between lived experience and institutional accounts, are considered a productive site for launching an investigation into ruling relations. Likewise, in the context of this collection, tensions speak to the complicated project of producing research for activism by researchers who are variously located and the need to recognize their inherent challenges and limits.

On that note, we acknowledge the limitations of this project, specifically in terms of its lack of engagement with more recent social movements, such as Black Lives Matter, Strike for Climate Change, and others that rose to prominence in recent years. Indeed, this book project came into being in 2014, and then the chapters were solicited. Hence, the chapters stand as artifacts of their time in terms of a conversation about social issues and activist mobilization. Nonetheless, we hope that this collection will advance the practice of PAE and advocacy-infused IE and inspire a new generation of political and institutional ethnographers to use the tools of those sociologies for social change.

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Part 1. Direct Action: The Sociology of Confrontation