Investigating the organizational everyday: a critical feminist approach

ABSTRACT

This article considers the possibilities and limits of applying institutional ethnography, a feminist theoretical and methodological approach that contributes to collective projects of investigating and transforming social life. Elaborating on the approach, the article reports on an ethnographic exploration of visual artists’ experiences and struggles in Canada's art world – a project that started from the standpoint of practising visual artists, examined their work and relations, and explicated practices and logics of art and valued work conditioning their lives. Speaking back to formal or text-based investigations of particular institutions, the article grapples with how to engage in research that more fully reveals the ‘social,’ attending to everyday life, to the ‘life work’ that people do, and to social forms that are threaded through intersecting, localized intimate and institutional spheres.

KEYWORDS:

• Contemporary work
• everyday life
• feminist research
• institutional ethnography

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to Richard Darville and Graham Smart for their mentorship with this study. Thanks also to Katie Bryant, Samantha McAleese, Rebecca Meisenbach, Lauren Montgomery and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Rudrum (2016), for example, attends to protests that aren’t always recorded textually and to patients’ small talk in waiting rooms in her study of maternity care in the Global South. Along the same lines, Williams and Rankin (2015) read billboards, public notices and built infrastructure for traces of social organization in their research on post-tsunami reconstruction in Thailand. Next, explicating a socially mediated ‘culture of whiteness’ (265), Hampton (2016) effectively analyzes ‘visual texts, display practices and official histories’ (265) in her study of racialized social relations in higher education. She does so, not only to understand how things are organized, but to expand the ‘imagined paramaters of what is possible’ (273).

2 Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programs can be thought of as producing insider art; outsider art refers to which is produced by self-taught or untrained artists (Rhodes 2000). Outsider artists are typically understood as self-taught or un-taught artists working outside art historical discourse or outside the mainstream, institutional art world (Van Heddeghem 2016). That said, Van Heddeghem (2016) notes, there are moving borders in the art world of ‘what is “in” and what is “out”, what is “art” and what is not,’ adding, that outsider art is often ‘accepted for something it ceases to be once it is accepted’ (6).

3 The research was approved by Carleton University’s Research Ethics Board. As per best practices with regards to research, participants received information about the purpose of the study prior to the interviews. This information included both formal invitation letters and consent forms that explained their options for remaining anonymous or being identified. Curators’ work and words are attributed to them accordingly, as they opted both verbally and in writing to be identified by their real names and to have their responses and data attributed to them. The names of all visual artists have been changed, as they referred to other people in their accounts.