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Isabel Dyck’s (1988) p. 131 adaptation of Dorothy Smith’s institutional ethnography. Repro- duced with kind permission of the author.
Source publication
In this paper we unpack how geographers have studied institutions, focusing specifically on institutional ethnography, often called ‘IE’. Sociologist Dorothy Smith is widely credited with developing institutional ethnography as an ‘embodied’ feminist approach. Smith studies the experiences of women in daily life, and the complex social relations in...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... rela- tions engender 'relations of the ruling' that guide, control, coordinate and regulate societies. Smith developed this approach to create 'a sociology for women', to explore how women are 'organized and determined by social pro- cesses' that extend beyond their immediate everyday worlds (Smith, 1987: 152 Figure 1. ...
Context 2
... institutional ethnography begins with identification of an experience, followed by not- ing the institutional processes that produce the experience, and then investigation of processes identified (Dyck, 1997;DeVault and McCoy, 2002). Dyck (1988) exemplifies this approach in her adaptation in Figure 1. She explains in a subsequent publication how Smith's conceptua- lization of institutional ethnography framed research with immigrant women: 'we consid- ered the way women talked of their experiences as a starting point to discovering the social rela- tions organizing their day-to-day lives ' (1997: 189). ...
Citations
... 53 Compared with most qualitative methodologies, which often focus on 'what people say,' ethnography captures 'what people do.' 54 This focus on behaviours is useful when studying resistance to a change that challenges established cultural norms, such as prioritising some patients compared with others, which may contradict the professional ethos of an equal duty of care for each patient. [55][56][57][58] Ethnographic methods include staff shadowing, observation of tasks and decision-making at team intake, as well as planning meetings to observe and inductively reveal conditions that facilitate or hinder PEACH implementation and cultural change. 59 Open access Patient and public involvement Service user interviews and co-design are central to PEACH. ...
Introduction
Children and young people (CYP) from priority populations in Australia have inequities in accessing healthcare, health outcomes and opportunities to lead healthy lives. Priority populations include CYP who are Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander, culturally and linguistically diverse (born in a country where English is not an official language and/or speak a language other than English at home), with experience of being a refugee or asylum seeker, living in out-of-home care or with a disability. Providing Enhanced Access to Child Health Services (PEACH) is an organisation-wide quality improvement project that aims to achieve equivalent health outcomes in CYP from priority populations compared with their non-priority population peers.
Methods and analysis
PEACH creates an equity-focused learning health system using electronic medical record (eMR) patient data and qualitative methodology exploring staff and service user experiences. Five priority population advisory groups, consisting of staff and priority population service users, guide the research at the Sydney Children’s Hospitals Network (SCHN), Australia’s largest tertiary paediatric health service. Interviews, surveys and co-design workshops with service users (CYP and/or their parent/carer) and staff describe existing health inequities and inform the design and implementation of interventions to improve identification, provision of earlier and supported access to services and effect cultural change. The impact of PEACH on reducing inequity in care and outcomes will be measured by comparing data during and after implementation (2020–2027) with baseline data before implementation (2015–2019) and with national controls, controlling for potential confounding factors. Health access and outcome measures, including emergency and preventable hospitalisations, critical care admission, discharge against medical advice, readmission and extended length of stay, will be analysed and drawn into dashboards, driving continuous learning and improvement.
Ethics and dissemination
The SCHN Human Research Ethics Committee (2022/ETH00145) and Aboriginal Health and Medical Research Council (1920/22) have granted ethics approval. Research findings will be shared with service users, staff advisory groups and the wider children’s healthcare sector through presentations, conferences and peer-reviewed journals.
... Focusing on these less visible and marginalized sites of housing contestation, this paper examines a critical but little regarded part of eviction and displacement that takes place in German cities, enacted through legal institutions. In doing so, I argue that an "institutional ethnography" (Billo and Mountz, 2016) of the issuance of eviction court orders can help to reveal how structural inequalities, along with the categories of age, gender, income, and race, are further exacerbated in the context of bureaucracies, which, as Hilbrandt states, "are generally assumed to regulate according to fixed rules" (Hilbrandt, 2022: 32, translated by the author). By expanding these empirical insights to the concepts of "survivability" (Lees et al., 2018) and "feminist (geo)legalities" (Brickell and Cuomo, 2019), I illustrate how "listening and being in the field" (Klosterkamp, 2023a) and by deploying "embodied exhibits" (Faria et al. 2020), a feminist legal geography lens is well positioned to investigate these intricacies. ...
... Inspired by long-standing and more recent calls for "studying up power" (Nader, 1972), my work foregrounds feminist tools and methodologies of "situated knowledge" production (Haraway, 1988;Rose, 2016). These approaches are well-suited for employing "Institutional Ethnography" (Billo and Mountz, 2016;Smith, 2005) to examine the intertwined legal nature of what has been termed "delusional property" (Blomley, 2009), which most often leads to dispossession and detenanting processes. Courtroom ethnography, a methodological tool within feminist legal geography, effectively serves this aim because it allows researchers to delve deeply into micro-level interactions and power dynamics within (geo-)legal settings (Gill and Hynes, 2021;Walenta 2020; see for more general accounts on feminist (geo)legalities: Brickell and Cuomo, 2019). ...
Displacement and de-tenanting are critical issues at the intersection of housing crises and legal frameworks, demanding a nuanced understanding that integrates class, gender, and race. This article aims to contribute to this scholarship by employing a feminist legal geography perspective, specifically through courtroom ethnography. The examination of eviction court cases in Germany reveals the intricate ways in which legal mechanisms mediate and perpetuate. The paper thus demonstrates how eviction processes are not merely legal transactions but are deeply embedded in power dynamics that disproportionately affect marginalized communities. By foregrounding the experiences and voices of those impacted, this paper underscores the material realities of eviction and highlights the importance of a feminist legal geographic approach to understanding and addressing housing injustices. This perspective not only illuminates the courtroom as a pivotal space where socio-legal battles unfold and emphasizes the necessity of listening and attuning to the lived experiences of the displaced.
... Inspired by these new research agendas in the field of Chinese urban political economy, as well as ethnographic approaches to the state (Billo and Mountz, 2015;Sharma and Gupta, 2006;Thelen et al., 2014), which is particularly suited for the micro-and nuanced analysis of the state that these new research agendas aspire for, this paper unveils how growth is debated within the Chinese local state, using an urban design project at Hexi New Town in Nanjing, China as a case study. In doing so, it also reveals that the everyday life of the Chinese local state is rife with conflicts and tensions, though not necessarily in a way conditioned by central-local dynamics that many other studies highlight (Shao et al., 2023;Wu et al., 2022). ...
... Reflecting on geographical scholarship on institutions, Billo and Mountz (2015: 201) advocate for a more profound and expansive engagement of geographers with IE, recognizing that ethnography is essential for developing granular understandings of "institutional powers and effects as dispersed, embedded, and entangled" and the porous boundaries of institutions. Furthermore, Billo and Mountz (2015) argue that geography brings a spatial sensibility, devoting greater attention to spatial differentiation, (re)territorialization, scalar dynamics, etc., of institutions and institutional effects, which institutional ethnography in its "original" form may lack. ...
... To summarize, firstly, both IE and NESB share a strong critique of structuralist and functionalist perspectives on social processes and the state. Secondly, they both emphasize the importance of conducting ethnographic research to provide a "thick description" of the everyday (Geertz, 2017: 3), which can reveal power relations, subjectivities, and emotions that interviews or discourse analysis alone cannot fully capture (Billo and Mountz, 2015). Naturally, both approaches can expose the contradictions, ambiguities, and uncertainties immanent within the state as it interacts with various social actors (Kay, 2018). ...
Taking note of the limitations of previously dominant political economy perspectives on China’s urban transformation, and inspired by recent works calling for “beyond-growth” and “micro-level” studies of the Chinese state, as well as ethnographic approaches to the state, this paper aims to explore the often-untold everyday politics of decision-making processes in China’s state-led urban development. Using an urban design project at Hexi New Town in Nanjing, China, as an empirical lens, the article makes three main contributions. Firstly, it reveals how the Chinese local state is constitutive of and lived through intense negotiations and contestations over urban visions, subjectivities, and rules of practices in everyday life. Secondly, building upon existing ethnographic approaches to the state, which focus primarily on state-society dynamics, this paper develops a framework to re-conceptualize the power topology within the Chinese local state as a field of relational modalities (ruling power relations (re)enacted in everyday practices) and relational embeddedness (situated positionalities and subjectivities of state actors). Thirdly, it further shows how the power modalities (the interplay of political-economy power vs technical-power, territorial power vs trans-territorial power) of the Chinese local state are constantly reworked, sometimes re-enacted, sometimes challenged, through both formal and tacit rules in the state’s everyday life. As such, the article provides a new set of entry points to open the black-box of the Chinese local state and to explore the relational nature and an ethnographic perspective of the local state and urban politics in China and beyond.
... Hierfür schlage ich ein methodisch-methodologisches Instrumentarium vor, das geeignet scheint, den spezifischen Besonderheiten des Forschens im Gericht Rechnung zu tragen und dabei an vorherige Ansätze anknüpft und diese erweitert (siehe hierzu auch: Gill & Hynes, 2021;Jeffrey, 2019aJeffrey, , 2019bJeffrey, , 2021Jeffrey & Jakala, 2015;Klosterkamp, 2022;Sylvestre et al., 2015;Vorbrugg et al., 2021). 2. Zweitens geht es mir mit diesem Beitrag auch um eine konzeptionelle Ausdehnung politisch-geographisch informierter Ansätze und konkret, um eine sinnvolle Ergänzung und Erweiterung bereits bestehender politisch-geographischer Untersuchungen der Kriminalitäts-und Terrorismusbekämpfung -etwa aus dem Bereich der "Kriminalgeographien" (Belina, , 2016Belina & Keitzel, 2019;Klamt, 2006;Schreiber, 2011;Sylvestre et al., 2015), "Geographien der Gewalt" (Korf & Schetter, 2016), "Geographien des Ernstfalls" (Korf, 2009), oder den "Geographien des Ausnahmezustands" (Hannah, 2006) und ihren politisch-rechtlich verschränkten lokal unterschiedlichen Verräumlichungstendenzen (Elden, 2007(Elden, , 2017Klosterkamp, 2021a) -um die Komponente der Logiken und Praktiken machtvoller Institutionen im Sinne einer study-up power Forschung (Billo & Mountz, 2016;Nader, 1972;Ramirez et al., 2021;Wissink & Oorschot, 2021). Diese doppelte Erweiterung systematisiere und konkretisiere ich am Beispiel eigener Feldforschungen im Kontext von Staatsschutzverfahren gegen deutsche Syrienrückkehrer:innen und syrischen Geflüchteten, die von 2015-2020 an fünf verschiedenen Oberlandesgerichten und zwei Landgerichten deutschlandweit (in Celle, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Köln, Frankfurt, München und Stuttgart-Stammheim) von mir teilnehmend beobachtet und vergleichend ausgewertet wurden (siehe Abbildung 1). ...
... In der Fusion beider Perspektiven liegt auch das emanzipatorische Potenzial dieser Monographie, die als studying-up power-Forschung(Nader, 1972) bzw. 'Ethnographie staatlichen Handelns'(Billo & Mountz, 2016; sowie für eine ausführlichere Darstellung:Vorbrugg et al., 2021, S. 88ff.) das Gericht im Allgemeinen sowie Staatsschutzprozesse im Besonderen als Erkenntnisgegenstand und Zugangsmethode humangeographischer Forschung stark macht.Diese besonderen Potenziale gerichtsethnographischer Forschung für das Themenspektrum an Recht interessierter humangeographischer Forschungsthemen und die mit dem studying-up power Ansatz verbundene Möglichkeit der Dekonstruktion der inhärenten Kriminalitäts-und Terrorismusbekämpfung sollen im nachfolgenden Kapitel anhand empirischer Beispiele ausgelotet werden. ...
Sarah Klosterkamp will in diesem Buch erstens bereits bestehende gerichtsethnographische Methoden für eine Humangeographie fruchtbar machen, die an Recht und seinen multiplen Wechselwirkungen im Sinne von Subjektkonstitutionen und Produktionsweisen gesellschaftlicher Ungleichheit interessiert ist. Hierfür schlägt sie ein methodisch-methodologisches Instrumentarium vor, das geeignet scheint, den spezifischen Besonderheiten des empirischen Forschens im Gericht Rechnung zu tragen. Zweitens geht es ihr um eine konzeptionelle Ausdehnung politisch-geographisch informierter Ansätze und konkret um eine sinnvolle Ergänzung und Erweiterung bereits bestehender politisch-geographischer Untersuchungen aus dem Bereich der Kriminalgeographien um die Komponente der Logiken und Praktiken machtvoller Institutionen im Sinne einer study-up power Forschung. Dies systematisiert und konkretisiert sie am Beispiel eigener Feldforschungen an Amts-, Landes- und Oberlandesgerichten in Celle, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Köln, Frankfurt, München und Stuttgart-Stammheim. So gelingt ihr eine dichte Ethnographie staatlichen Handelns und Bewertens von strafrechtlich relevanten Gegenständen und Personen an der für die Geographie spannenden Schnittstelle der Terrorismusbekämpfung, Kriminalitätskartierung, Migrations- und Fluchtbewegungen und Materialtransporten, die durch den EU-Schengenraum und bis in das (ehemalige) Kalifat des ‚Islamischen Staates' reichen.
... This article emerges from my larger doctoral research project on the transnational and multi-level governance of climate change adaptation in the Mekong Delta. It takes inspiration from institutional ethnography (Billo & Mountz, 2015;Corson et al., 2014;Nader, 1972) in accounting for the structures, norms, practices, and discourses through which knowledge for climate change adaptation is translated by intermediary actors, a broad category. Research for the article was carried out between October 2016 and January 2018 primarily in Trà Vinh province, in the coastal Mekong Delta of Vietnam, as well as during visits to regional hubs Cần Thơ and Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC). ...
In Vietnam, an entire multilevel governance apparatus is now engaged in furthering the climate adaptation agenda, much of it focused on the Mekong Delta. A politics of translation is at the heart of these operations, as differently situated actors reproduce, negotiate, and mobilize knowledge for adaptation in pursuit of varied objectives. In this article, I examine the role of intermediary actors that work as knowledge brokers and translators, transmitting knowledge upwards, downwards, and horizontally within this governance system, influencing adaptation practice in the process. Drawing on cross-scalar ethnographic research with Vietnamese scientists and researchers, development practitioners, agricultural extension agents, and provincial-level bureaucrats, it considers the agency these actors have in shaping the trajectory of socio-ecological change in the delta. Exploring strategies of translation and the interests they reflect, it finds that knowledge for adaptation is largely constrained by the dominant economic development agenda, where neoliberal discourses and state goals of "building socialism" intersect in defining the success of adaptation and its ideal subjects. Finally, the article identifies contestations and switch-points that occur and seeks to identify potential openings for transformative pathways to emerge.
... other scholars have adapted and applied our methodology to other fields (e.g., illegal wildlife trade: see Massé et al. 2020; climate change: see Marion Suiseeya and Zanotti 2019). CEE assembles teams of ethnographers, building on and adapting a variety of ethnographic approaches such as multisited ethnography (Marcus 1995), institutional ethnography (Smith 1987(Smith , 2006Billo and Mountz 2015), multisited institutional ethnography (Lewis et al. 2003;Bebbington and Kothari 2006), collaborative multisited ethnography (Choy et al. 2009a(Choy et al. , 2009b, and team ethnography (Erickson and Stull 1998). (For those new to ethnography as a methodology for studying GEG, Chapter 10 provides an introduction). ...
Global environmental negotiations have become central sites for studying the interaction between politics, power, and environmental degradation. This book challenges what constitutes the sites, actors, and processes of negotiations beyond conventional approaches and provides a critical, multidisciplinary, and applied perspective reflecting recent developments, such as the increase of actor diversity and the digitalisation of global environmental meetings. It provides a step-by-step guide to the study of global environmental negotiations using accessible language and illustrative examples from different negotiation settings, including climate change, biodiversity, and ocean protection. It introduces the concept of 'agreement-making' to broaden understanding of what is studied as a 'site' of negotiation, illustrating how diverse methods can be applied to research the actors, processes, and order-making. It provides practical guidance and methodological tools for students, researchers and practitioners participating in global environmental agreement-making. One of a series of publications associated with the Earth System Governance Project: www.cambridge.org/earth-system-governance.
... Care is provided in a variety of settings ranging from familial spaces to establishments C A R E A N D W E L L B E I N G D U R I N G T H E C O V I D -1 9 P A N D E M I C providing formal health care. It is understood that health care institutions, such as hospitals and clinics, are settings that can enhance or reduce patient safety and well-being (Billo and Mountz 2015) as does care provided by the voluntary sector (Conradson 2003). Some researchers have called care a moral and ethical responsibility toward others (Lawson 2008;Held 2018), a responsibility that we need to collectively administer through changes in institutional, political, economic, and social systems to effect global "radical care" for everyone (Silver and Hall 2020). ...
This study examines the intersection of wellbeing and care experienced by first-generation Asian Indian high-skilled immigrants in the USA in spaces varying from the home to the neighborhood, city, and state in sending and receiving countries during the COVID-19 pandemic. The spread of COVID-19 resulted in new stressors that affected the physical, mental, and emotional health of interviewees, but many found ways to mitigate the effects of the pandemic through reconfigured care giving and receiving practices. Findings indicate that wellbeing of self and immediate family members, and transnational care for aging relatives, along with state and self-imposed social isolation, meant that spaces of care had to be transformed. Along with local community networks, social media connections played a crucial role in managing and receiving transnational care. However inconsistent policies around masking, COVID protocols, vaccine and booster regulations and distributions created additional stress on immigrants tasked with managing care across nations.
... In the past decade various urban scholars (see Billo & Mountz, 2015;Shatz, 2009;Yanow et al., 2011) have engaged in ethnography to understand social actors within the city and how they shape everyday processes of urbanity, urban governance, and urban policy formulation. The research process was informed by Henderson's (2016) suggestion of "ethnographic sensibility." ...
The paper contends that subaltern urbanism is a way of life in the context of contemporary Zimbabwe. Through ethnography conducted in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, between February 2019 and May 2019, the paper extends the concept of subaltern urbanism through presenting subaltern urbanism as a way of life that encapsulates individuality and urban governance. The paper argues that subaltern urbanism is scripted by individuals positioned at the bottom of the social ladder and urban governing institutions. The paper maintains the view that subaltern urbanism as a way of life denotes redefinition and (re)imagining contemporary post-colonial urbanity. Finally, the paper proposes the notion that the author labels as “subalternization of the city” by urban governing institutions and suggests new ways of understanding urbanism in Africa.
... A feminist geopolitical approach pays attention both to invisiblized and marginalized subjects such as Mexican asylum-seekers, and to the grounded/de facto ways that borders are policed, and migration is managed via technologies like Las Listas. It focuses our attention on the particular bodies and places that engage these bordering practices, examining the state at the scale of its everyday implementation (Billo and Mountz, 2015;Carte, 2014;Fluri, 2009;Torres, 2018) and it emplaces the production of border-crossing lists without overly fetishizing such tools as apolitical agentive objects. An intimate geopolitics of Las Listas shows us how bordering actually operates, how it is experienced, who it impacts, and how it is, with great difficulty, negotiated. ...
Between 2018 and 2020, dramatic changes in US-Mexico policy transformed experiences of asylum on the border. Quotas on applications at ports of entry (known as "metering"), the “Remain in Mexico” policy, and the deployment of the pandemic era “lockdown” through Title 42, each severely limited asylum opportunities. In response, a host of informal waiting lists emerged, developed and were utilized by a binational network of non-governmental and government agencies, shelters, cartels, and individuals. In this article we use a feminist geographic lens to examine the intimate geopolitics of esperar created by these lists. Via in-depth oral histories with Mexican asylum-seekers, shelter staff, legal advocates, and the wider border bureaucracy, we examine their formation, everyday management, the slow violences and immediate threats they posed, and their work as an informal technology of state control. Our analysis demonstrates how the lists operated as informal tactics of diversion and delay, producing a false sense of certainty while using indefinite waiting times as soft and surreptitious mechanisms to block displaced people’s legal claims for asylum. This imposed distinctly gendered burdens on women and youth. However, we also identify how the lists, where appropriated by migrants themselves, became tools to resist the hierarchies of the US nation-state and its territorial impositions. Our work extends established political geographic analyses of migration by attending to the interscalar, quotidian, and embodied realities of border practice – manifest amidst today’s lockdown by the slow violences of waiting.
... Inspired by both long-standing and more recent accounts of feminist geography's plea for embodied, emotional, and reflexive research practices (Coddington 2017;England 1994;Faria and Mollett 2016;Kobayashi 2003;Longhurst and Johnston 2014;Noxolo 2009), as well as by feeling a deep resonance with scholarly undertakings wherein (better) listening strategies serve as a major tool for critically approaching knowledge production (Hyams 2004;Koch 2020;Ellul-Knight 2019;Ratnam 2019), this article exemplifies the need for a politics of listening that is alive to 'affectual intensities' (Militz, Faria, and Schurr 2020) and a feminist sense of mutual care and responsibility (Cuomo and Massaro 2016;Ellis 2007) within the field of court ethnography. Building upon Noxolo's call to '"write" the body both as a social, political and economic location and as a sensory agent ' (2009, 63), I illustrate how such an endeavor may serve as an embodied, affectual-led, and grounded way to produce institutionally imbued knowledge of the global intimacies of (state) power (Mountz and Hyndman 2006;Billo and Mountz 2016), attentive to highlight our own limits of reflexivity (England 1994;Kobayashi 2003) from within. Rather than advocating a prescriptive approach involving a set of fieldwork methods, I call for a politics of listening in the field of court ethnography, not only in a productive but also in a socially reproductive way, which may relate to the special degree of power-imbalances within institutionalized, highly sensitive research settings, such as courtrooms-but which can be found elsewhere too (e.g., Billo and Hanrahan 2021;Cuomo 2021;Koch 2013;Woon 2013). ...
... Much important work has been carried out within the vibrant field of legal geography that highlights the multiple dimensions of how the law shapes space, identity, and power dynamics (Braverman et al. 2014;Bennett and Layard 2015;Jeffrey 2019); however, little has been said concerning the geographers who attended highly institutionalized research settings. Thus, despite long-standing calls by geographers for ethnography (Herbert 2000) in general and alongside more recent accounts where ethnographies have been advocated within institutionalized settings (Billo and Mountz 2016;Koch 2013;Ramirez, Faria, and Torres 2021) in particular, there are a few notable exceptions of geographers who have gone to court to trace this 'geolegality' (Brickell and Cuomo 2019) in place, which renders social/emotional/affective dimensions and formulates the law and its objectives. These works present theoretical renderings of trials and their whereabouts, focusing on emotions, narratives, and spatial tactics (Sylvestre et al. 2015;Klosterkamp 2021a), drawing on the ways that the state power attempts to deal with fraud, migration, or other violent objectives within a certain region (Jeffrey and Jakala 2014;Walenta 2020) and advocating court watching as a form of (geo)political activism (Gill and Hynes 2021;Cuomo 2021). ...
Listening occurs in many ways in fieldwork situations, but it is not always consensual or without complexities. It is especially challenging in situations deeply embedded in institutional power, rendered and shaped by the law and its objectives. Yet, how listening differ within and between sites saturated with institutional knowledge remain still understudied. In this paper, I use my five-year fieldwork experience in German antiterrorism trials to illustrate how applying different politics of listening gradually deepened my understanding of what the trial and the wider legal process as a whole were making visible, erasing, privileging, or ignoring. I suggest that such an approach has much to contribute to a feminist analysis of (state) power, including its expression through the law, by back-bound different modes of listening to three different occasions within the court and its antechambers. Rethinking the process of knowledge production within court ethnography in this way can provide a demonstration of the insights offered by a politics of listening that is alive to the affectual intensities that emerge out of and through our bodies’ engagements, coping with, negotiating over, and healing from the objec- tives that appear within these highly institutionalized and much powerful settings.
