JOAN ACKER

Professor Emerita, University of Oregon.  Widely known as a writer on women’s work, organizations, and comparative studies of welfare state policies.  She has written Doing Comparable Worth (1989), as well as widely cited articles on women and stratification (1973) and gender organizations (1990), and is currently completing a study of Oregon residents’  experiences of welfare reform.

MARIE CAMPBELL

I studied with Dorothy Smith at UBC and OISE, finding her methods of thinking “social organization” extremely useful for understanding the world of nursing and health care that had been my own prior working environment. After finishing a PhD in Sociology, I taught for a few years in a School of Social Work (Carleton University, Ottawa) before moving to Victoria, BC, where I became part of the small faculty of a new graduate program for nurses, social workers and child and youth care practitioners at the University of Victoria.. 

In this graduate program, I designed courses using the thinking and methods of analysis Dorothy had taught and that I had already put to use in studying new technologies for managing hospital nursing, and in other research after finishing my doctorate. In these courses, I experimented with ways of getting students to think analytically about their own  work and its organization. We brought into the classroom pieces of organizational “texts” – that students were familiar with and used in routine organizational settings. In little research projects, we learned, together, how to problematize students’ everyday working life and its taken for granted knowledge. Students were learning how to see the ruling relations at play in their lives and those of their clients.

To complement the problematizing of their work-worlds, I also devised courses to teach new ways of knowing that would supplement (or challenge) students’ reliance on what  and how they had learned in their prior professional training. (I was, of course, attempting to draw on what I had found so illuminating about studying with Dorothy). I focused on the (feminist) issue of identifying and acknowledging “first-hand experience” and solving the problems of how it can be relied on. Because these students were all experienced practitioners in the human services, my teaching always had a basis in their personal and professional commitments to social justice, however differently that might be expressed. Even more useful to what I was attempting to teach, these students were likely to have been “there”, in the sites where people’s everyday lives were touched by ruling practices. What this shared basis meant was that intellectual work, including research, that claimed to be “in the interest of people” not only appeared to be appropriate, but it opened for discussion topics near to the hearts of many of these students. Some of what I learned as I experimented with my teaching appears in Mapping Social Relations: A Primer in Doing Institutional Ethnography, a co-authored book published in 2002.

During my twelve years at UVic I was working hard at teaching and supervising students’ research projects, and I was also conducting research – on a number of topics. One was a four-year collaborative and community-based project, Project Inter-Seed, sub-titled “learning from the health care experiences of people with disabilities”. This was my first attempt at “participatory” research. The project staff’s community development work was an enormous contribution to making the project “participatory” – or what we came to call, more precisely and perhaps more modestly, “collaborative research”. My own intellectual interest was in how to make institutional ethnography accessible to our community-based and diversely “located” team of researchers. Project Inter-Seed drew inspiration from Ellen Pence’s descriptions of doing “audits” of the procedures followed by police and the courts in processing cases of violence against women. We adopted this approach that could move from embodied actualities to text and back. Project Inter-Seed’s team of researchers made up of disabled people, health care practitioners and academics first mapped the processes for obtaining Home Support services in the public health care system in Victoria, BC. Then we conducted ethnographic observations of all the activities through which these services were made available to people by other people. We arrived at a place where we could identify the differences between what was claimed about the service provision and what really happened, and we could speak about what routinely interfered with what people with disabilities defined as “good home support”.

I continue to be fascinated by questions of how “knowing” works, and how things get done, authorized and justified as correct, even as worthy, in words and texts. I worry about how democracy fails when representation of the world is skewed. Much of my time since I have retired in 2002 is dedicated to small efforts to draw together more consistently “what actually happens” with what is said and known about it more or less reliably and authoritatively, and acted on.

DOROTHY SMITH

I was born in the north of England in 1926 -- a long time ago, another world.  It’s hard to connect who I am now with the girl and young woman who lived back there then.  I had worked as a young woman in a variety of jobs, ending up doing secretarial work in the book publishing industry.  When I was twenty-five, I was fed up.  I’d tried to get on in publishing, but it was a no go for women at that time.  I thought I could get a better secretarial job if I had an undergraduate degree so I applied to the London School of Economics and was accepted.    I took a degree in sociology, with a major in social anthropology.  I was fascinated.

I came to the United States to go to graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley in 1955.    I had met Bill Smith (William Reid Smith, now dead) while I was studying at the London School of Economics and we had decided to get married and to pursue graduate studies at Berkeley.   While I was working on my doctorate, we had two children, the last born nine months before I finished.   Then Bill left and we were divorced.  It was a shock to be the one responsible not only for the children and household, but also for earning a living (something Bill wasn’t into at that time).  I taught sociology at the University of California at Berkeley for a couple of years but only had a lecturer position. This was around 1964 or 1965.  Women’s issues were just beginning to be raised during my last two years at Berkeley.  When I was teaching there, I was for most of the time, the only woman teaching in a faculty of forty-four.  And, of course, I was not in a regular position. 

Something was happening among women then.  There was a big conference in San Francisco on “the potential of women” and although all the main speakers were men, we women got together and talked.  About that time also a sociologist called Jessie Bernard had published a book on academic women which described the kinds of inequities women experienced in the university.  I gathered my courage together and put on a session with women graduate students in which I first went through the Berkeley calendar describing for each department where women were (in history there were none at all; in psychology some eminent women who were, like myself, on temporary appointments).  I then invited their stories and they had many.

Being an immigrant is a bit tough even though you know the language and can earn a decent salary. No family to fall back on.  And then there was none of the after school day care as there is now.   I thought I’d do better if I were in England so I got a job there for a couple of years.  But we didn’t like living in England and I was terribly overworked.  I had three jobs offers, one at Berkeley, one in New York and one at the University of British Columbia.  We didn’t want to go back to the United Sates (by this time my sons were involved in the decision) because we were very much opposed to the Vietnam war.  We looked at the map and saw that north of Vancouver, in those days, there was a magical region that, in those days, had no roads.  That settled it.  Canada was our destination..  . 

In my intellectual life there have been three big moments: One was going to the London School of Economics when I was twenty-six and becoming fascinated with sociology; the second was a course given by Tamotsu Shibutani at Berkeley on George Herbert Mead which laid the groundwork for a later deep involvement with the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (I encountered his work accidentally by picking up one of his books in a bookstore and knowing instantly that that’s where I belonged); and finally and perhaps biggest of all, the women’s movement which was for me a total transformation of consciousness at multiple levels. It led me into the strange paths I’m still pursuing of undoing, among other things, the sociology I’d learned so thoroughly to practice.

Part of that transformation came about at the University of British Columbia because I taught in one of the first women’s studies courses (but not the first–that was, I think, at Concordia in Montreal) in Canada.  There were four of us, Helga Jacobson (anthropologist), Meredith Kimball (psychologist), Annette Kolodny (English) and myself (sociology).  We started out with little if anything in the way of books or other materials to teach with so we had to make it up.  That was a powerful impetus to go from the kinds of deep changes in my psyche that accompanied the women’s movement to writing those changes into the social.  In these changes, my experiences of being a mother and housewife were central; I made them central.

It was in the context of the last that I rediscovered Marx whom I’d read at the London School of Economics, but at that time using a distorting interpretation.  His work became very important to me in many ways, partly because of the politics, but much more so as a method of thinking that helped me develop a sociology for women and what I now think of as a sociology for people.

At the same time and largely by accident, I became involved in the formation of a women’s action group at the University of British Columbia that worked to change the status of women at all levels of the university.  I also became involved in establishing a women’s research centre in Vancouver outside the university and aimed at providing action-relevant research to women’s organizations and was part of building an organization among women academics that connected women faculty in community colleges and universities                       

In 1977 I went, accompanied by a group of graduate students, to teach in the sociology department at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), at that time a remarkable place of openness to new thinking.  At arrived just after the hiring of another feminist, Margrit Eichler, and at the same time as Mary O’Brien.  Though it wouldn’t be true to say that OISE was progressive in its views on women, the sociology department had a number of feminist students and all of us working together were successful in introducing transformations that I don’t think could have taken place at that time anywhere else. It was there that I began to write a sociology for women, discovering and formulating an uneasiness that had indeed been there since my days at Berkeley when, even back then, I’d thought that there was something very wrong with how sociologists thought and, for the most part, still think.

I have built my written/published work up paper by paper.  Developing a sociology for women/people started with the idea of beginning in the standpoint of a housewife and mother in the actualities of her everyday world and anchoring an investigation of the social in the concrete actualities of the everyday and of everyday doings.   Starting with experience was what we knew how to do in the women’s movement.  Indeed we needed it because we came to see more and more clearly how the intellectual and cultural world we’d participated in had been put together from men’s standpoint (doesn’t mean that it was misogynist, just that we women weren’t there as speakers and knowers).  Starting to build a sociology that started in the everyday experiences of our lives launched a work of discovering how to do it, a work that still occupies me though I am no longer alone in pursuing it.

My first formulation of this was “women’s perspective as a radical critique of sociology.”  It was written for a conference at the University of Oregon in Eugene and I drove down with two or three friends (in those days, early seventies, crossing the border was as tricky politically as it has become since September 11, 2001).  I had had such difficulty before this paper in writing and completing anything for publication.  I think I had difficulty in recognizing my own authority to speak in the discourse of male-dominated sociology.  But this time, it was quite different.  I knew I was writing for women, that I’d put forward what I had to say as best I could, and it would become part of an ongoing conversation with women in many places.  Before I’d had this image of a panel of judges waiting to pounce on my work.  Now they were gone and I was able to see conferences papers and publications as a way of “talking” to women rather than as exposing me to judgment.  In those early days, I also put together with Sara David a collection of papers representing a feminist critique of psychiatry (Women look at psychiatry: I’m not mad, I’m angry, Press Gang, Vancouver BC, 1975

I wrote and published many papers after this, some political, among them a pamphlet called Feminism and Marxism: a place to begin, a way to go, and some more strictly out of research and thinking sociologically.  In 1987 I discovered the power of publishing a book of my own.  In 1986 Evelyn Fox Keller, then at Northeastern University started a series of feminist books and asked me to do a collection of papers.  The Everyday World as Problematic: a feminist sociology was published in the next year.  In 1990 I published two more collections of papers: The Conceptual Practices of Power: a feminist sociology of knowledge (Northeastern University Press) and Texts, Facts, and Femininity: exploring the relations of ruling (Routledge); and then in 1999 Writing the Social: Critique, theory and investigations (University of Toronto Press).  I am currently writing a book on institutional ethnography, an approach in sociology designed to realize the objectives of a sociology for people. If I finish it in time, it will be published in 2004 by Altamira Press.

I have taken a great deal of pleasure in this quest for a sociology for women.   Conceived simply, it is a sociology in and of the same world as that in which it’s written and read, and relies on that world to complete the sense it can make.  So it looks outward, towards discovering how people are actually putting things together.  Its feminism is foundational but not always its topic.  Finding out how to do it, how to teach it as a skill to others, and what I can learn by practising it, is a continuing pleasure for me.   Being an old women, as I am now,  is so far only an opportunity to deploy what I’ve learned how to do.  I’m lucky in that there were many excellent graduate students at OISE who have gone on to take up and further this kind of work (Marie Campbell and Ann Manicom have collected some of their work in a book they edited -- Experience, Knowledge and Ruling Relations: Explorations in the social organization of knowledge, University of Toronto Press, 1995) so I have some company and people to learn from.

Liat Ben Moshe  is a PhD student in Sociology and Disability Studies at Syracuse University. Originally from Israel, she holds a Bachelor's degree in Psychology, Sociology & Anthropology from Tel Aviv University. Areas of interest lie in parallels and intersections of femaleness and disability, construction of bodily difference and normalcy, knowledge production on disability and parallels to other identity formations. Liat is also a member of the BCCC (link to http://soeweb.syr.edu/thechp/beyond_compliance.html).

Belinda Leach is a social anthropologist at the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada. She has spent 20 years researching gender and work issues in Canada and internationally, examining industrial homework and trends towards other forms of precarious work in urban and rural Ontario, and workers’ and their families’ responses to it. She is co-author, with Tony Winson, of Contingent Work, Disrupted Lives: Labour and Community in the New Rural Economy (University of Toronto Press 2002) and co-editor with Winnie Lem of Culture, Economy, Power: Anthropology as Critique, Anthropology as Praxis (SUNY Press 2002).

Rannveig is the co-editor, with Kelley Johnson from Australia, of Women with Intellectual Disabilities: Finding a Place in the World (London: Jessica Kingsley, 2000) an international collection of writings by and about women with intellectual disabilities. She just completed a book in English, Gender and Disability Research in the Nordic Countries, co-edited with Kristjana Kristiansen from Norway (Lund, Sweden: Studentlitterature,  2004). Rannveig has also published a number of books in Icelandic, most of them on family life and marginalized groups (families of disabled parents, lesbian and gay families, and a forthcoming book on immigrant families). Her most recent book in Icelandic is Fötlunarfræði: Nýjar íslenskar rannsóknir (Disability Studies: New Icelandic Research). (Reykjavík: University of Iceland Press, 2003).

Susan Turner is a full time administrator at the University of Guelph. Her PhD thesis “Municipal Planning, Land Development and Environmental Intervention: an Institutional Ethnography” (OISE/UT 2003) analyses the work organization of muliple participants drawn into the planning process. She taught International Development for five years, exploring development processes and knowledge production with students wanting to understand the organization of the field. In activism and teaching she began to develop the method of mapping text-based work processes and their ‘speech genres’ in order to make visible the peculiar workings of macro level institutions. She edited with Dorothy Smith Sally Hacker’s studies of work Doing It the Hard Way: Investigations of Gender and Technology (Unwin Hyman 1990) and has published articles in Campbell and Manicom eds. Knowledge, Experience and Ruling Relations (UTP 1995), and in Studies in Cultures, Organizations and Societies, Vol.7, No2. (2001).

She brings an activist perspective to her research.  Theoretically, her research is informed by a post-structuralist analysis of discourse and power combined with a historical materialist analysis of the manner in which everyday activities are circumscribed and organized by larger social relations, such as the imperatives of trade liberalization and the globalized military industrial complex.