EVENT: Diversity Dialogues - Breakfast with Professor Dorothy Smith

Dorothy Smith is one of Canada’s most respected scholars. Her distinctive sociology, institutional ethnography, is a method of inquiry that uses everyday experience as a lens to examine social relations and social institutions. Concerned with articulating an inclusive sociology that goes beyond looking at a particular group of people from the detached viewpoint of the researcher, this is a method of inquiry for people, incorporating the expert's research and language into everyday experience to examine social relations and institutions.

At this breakfast, Dorothy Smith will describe some of the uses and potential benefits of institutional ethnography in the public sector.

Dorothy E. Smith is a professor emerita in the Department of Sociology & Equity Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, and Adjunct Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Victoria. Over the past twenty-five years she has been actively involved in researching the development and implications of the standpoint of women in sociology and problematizing the objectified forms of organization and social relations characteristic of contemporary society. Most recently her work has focussed on the significance of texts for the organization of power.

In 1975, with Sarah David, she published a groundbreaking collection of essays by feminists called Women Look at Psychiatry: I'm Not Mad, I'm Angry. Since then she has published numerous articles and books, including The Everyday World As Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (1987), The Conceptual Practices of Power: A Feminist Sociology of Knowledge (1990), Text, Facts and Femininity: Exploring The Relations of Ruling (1990) and Writing the Social; Critique, Theory and Investigations (1998). Her new book, Institutional Ethnography, was published by Alta Mira in early 2005.

She is the recipient of a number of awards and honours including honorary doctorates from several universities, the American Sociological Association's Jessie Bernard Award (1993), and the American Sociological Association's Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award (1999).

Registration Cost: $25 (includes full hot breakfast)

More information about this event and a registration facility is available at the IAS website www.ias.uwa.edu.au