It is amazing that you can read a text and not really understand much of it and then reread it a month or so later and find that it is totally comprehensible. This is exactly what happened to me now with Smith’s article. I had no idea why my supervisor had recommended it to me – I just couldn’t see the link to my work and today it’s perfectly clear.

Smiths comparison between the state-of-mind which embraces us in our home life as women and the state-of-mind in the context of university.

Home – local, connected to a particular place and time, particular familiar people

Uni – impersonal, people are known through “printed names on texts”, classed

Institutional ethnography… begins with the issues and problems of people’s lives and develops inquiry from the standpoint of their experience in and of the actualities of their everyday living… It conceives of the social as actually happening among people who are situated in particular places at particular times and not as ‘meaning’ or ‘norms’ ” (p. 18-19).

Practitioners are seen as knowing best how to describe their experiences, they understand their own practice. It is the researchers role to investigate how this local knowledge joins knowledge created in other contexts.

Institutional ethnography is grounded in the understanding that each individual experiences events in a unique way.

People are always acting in a particular context – place and time.

“In Institutional ethnography, the researcher is permitted to learn, perhaps must learn, from each interview what may inform and change the subsequent.”

“But institutional ethnographers are actively seeking to be changed, to discover not only what they did not know but also, as they go about their work, how to think differently about what they are learning” (p. 28).

Smith, D.  E. (2002). Institutional ethnography. In T. May (Ed.) Qualitative research in action (pp. 17-52). London: Sage.

image: http://www.rcs.k12.va.us/gifted/gifted/Graphics/insight.jpg