Critical Institutional Ethnography — Uncovering Power in Institutional Settings

Critical institutional ethnography (CIE) combines Dorothy Smith's institutional ethnography with an explicit critical theory lens to investigate how ruling relations, texts, and institutional discourses reproduce inequality and power asymmetries. Starting from the lived experiences of people positioned within or subordinated by institutions, CIE traces how abstract institutional processes coordinate everyday life and subjects those processes to normative critique aimed at social transformation.