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A materialist-feminist inquiry is an empirical inquiry that begins from, and ends with, the lived experiences and actions of people in their local setting. Instead of using a positivist approach to inquiry, creating authoritative and objective knowledge, Smith argued that we should always work from the empirical world, from where people are situated in their local and particular settings (Smith, 1990b). Given that our education and professional training is grounded in theory, it is too easy to lose sight of people’s experiences in the local setting and return to theoretical knowledge. Smith states:

There must be different experiences of the world and different bases of experience. We must not do away with them by taking advantage of our privileged speaking to construct a sociological version that we then impose upon them as their reality. We may not rewrite the other’s world or impose

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upon it a conceptual framework that extracts from it what fits with ours. Their reality, their varieties of experience, must be an unconditional datum. It is the place from which inquiry begins. (Smith, 1990a, p. 25)

In order to work empirically, it is necessary to relate and return to the lived experiences of people in the actuality of their lives.

Feminist epistemology

Smith’s work is grounded in feminism (Smith, 1974b, 1987), though she formally renamed IE as a sociology for people in 2005 (Smith, 2005). Through the civil rights movements women discovered that they had in various ways been silenced, without authority or voice (Smith, 1987). Various feminist standpoint epistemologies developed through this period. Instead of seeking to produce knowledge by objective observation where the researcher remains outside the others’ experience, knowledge should be socially situated. Knowledge should begin from the lived experiences of people, and explore how the institutions, including legal, legislative, economic, educational, welfare, and health, govern their everyday lives (Harding & Norberg, 2005). Smith, as with other feminists, was rejecting the patriarchy of mainstream social science. She stated that the social sciences were complicit in the exercise of power to control relations, including between men and women, black and white, heterosexual and homosexual, and so on. She called this the Conceptual Practices of Power (Smith, 1990a).

However, when we begin an inquiry from the actualities of people’s lives, opportunities for finding solutions to problems encountered in the social world become possible. For example, Deveau (2011) in his work on people with disabilities states:

‘Unlike studies … about persons with disabilities in the workplace, my study

is for persons with disabilities, so that they and their allies can gain a thorough understanding of how the material conditions they encounter in their everyday lives are operating for someone else’s benefit. It is only with

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that type of knowledge that we can inform our praxis, and work towards ending the ongoing discrimination against us in the workplace’. (p. 154)

Through the explication of the ruling relations the possibility of deposing the dominant discourses becomes a reality, such as those constructing the subjectivities of people with disabilities.

Smith (2005) identified that IE applied equally to all people who were excluded or marginalised in some way and struggling within their social world. Institutional ethnographic inquiry was expanded to include both the gendered relations of ruling, as well as other organised forms of ruling, including class, race and ethnicity. Gender, class, race and ethnicity, are not treated in IE as external determinants, but are considered as social relations that organise people’s experiences, often resulting in inequalities. The purpose of IE remains clear that it is to produce knowledge for people, and not knowledge of people, by constructing meaningful inquiry where the answers “fit the contours” of the people’s lives (DeVault, 1999, p. 23).

Materiality

The materiality of the social world is grounded in the happenings and doings of people. IE is situated within a constructivist paradigm where the social world is continuously produced and shaped by people. Similarly, other social scientists, such as Bruno Latour (1993) describe how technologies and artefacts, or ‘things’, are invested with meaning and interpreted by people in their local situation, shaping their decisions and actions. Latour aimed to overcome the detachment of the object world, where things function according to the laws of nature, from the “social world that is ruled by meaning, culture and people” (van Hout, Pols, & Willems, 2015, p. 1208). Latour’s interest was in showing how particular technologies were materialised by people engaging with them. For example, Pols and Willems (2011) evaluated telecare, and found that the same technology was used differently and “tinkered with” (p. 484) by the users, in this case people with chronic lung conditions.

95 In turn, this affected health care practices. The researchers described the engagement of the users with telecare as the “taming and unleashing” of the technologies.

Taking a materialist framework allows the institutional ethnographer to look for socially organised connections between the ruling relations, including texts and technologies, and what is actually happening in the local situation with local people (Campbell & Gregor, 2004). Explicating these connections as materially existing shows how the ruling relations are enacted in local settings and play out powerfully in the lives of individuals in the local situation (Campbell & Gregor, 2004). Smith, as did Vološinov (1973), drew strongly on Marx and Engels’ ideas of materiality (Smith, 1990a). As a materialist inquiry, the study begins from the experience and activities of the individual in their local setting.

Experience is not the same as perspective (Smith, 1990a). Neither is a materialist inquiry about our “inner explorations” (p. 23) of an experience, because, such subjectivist interpretations are themselves an aspect of the ruling organisation of consciousness. Rather experience is the actual actions, activities, happenings, and doings of people in their local situation. In IE, this is often termed work25_{. An inquiry begins from people’s everyday work} and actual activities, as they are happening in the material world, within their local setting. Returning to the ontological position of IE, the ruling relations are coordinating textually people’s actions and experiences. Materiality, then, is the enactment of texts by real or embodied people in their actual social world. Key to an IE is knowing the material aspects of people’s lives, what they actually do, and not what their theoretical or ideological knowledge is.

25 _{Work was defined in chapter one. it can “include anything that people do that takes time, effort,}

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