F eminist and g ender t heories
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318 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY IN THE CONTEMPORARY ERA d orothy e. s mith (1926– ): a B ioGraphical s ketch Dorothy E. Smith was born in the north of England in 1926. She worked at a variety of jobs and was a secretary at a publishing company before she decided to enhance her employment prospects by attaining a college degree. She began college at the London School of Economics in 1951, and received her bachelor’s degree in sociology in 1955. She and her husband then decided to both go on to graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley. Smith maintains that, although her years at Berkeley were in many ways the unhappiest of her life, she learned a lot, both inside and outside the classroom (University of California n.d.). Through “the experience of marriage, of immigration closely following marriage, . . . of the arrival of children, of the departure of a husband rather early one morn- ing, of the jobs that became available” she learned about the discrepancy between social scientific description and lived experience (Smith 1987:65). Through courses in survey methods and mathematical sociology, she learned a type of sociological methodology that she would come to reject, but with which she would come to formulate her own opposing methodology. Through a wonderful course taught by Tamotsu Shibutani, she gained a deep appreciation for George Herbert Mead, which “laid the groundwork for a later deep involve- ment with the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty” (Institutional Ethnography n.d.). After completing her doctorate in sociology in 1963, Smith worked as a research soci- ologist and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. At times, she was the only woman in the university’s department of sociology. Deeply moved by the newly emerging women’s movement, Smith organized a session for graduate students to “tell their stories” about gender inequities in academia (of which “there were many”) (ibid.). By the late 1960s, Smith’s marriage had fallen apart, and, lacking daycare and family support, she returned home to England to raise her children and teach. She became a lecturer in sociology at the University of Essex, Colchester. Several years later, Smith accepted a full-time position at the University of British Columbia, and it was here that Smith’s femi- nist transformation, which had begun in Berkeley, deepened. Smith taught one of the first women’s studies courses; the lack of existing materials gave her impetus to “go from the kind of deep changes in my psyche that accompanied the women’s movement to writing those changes into the social” (ibid.). Smith also helped create a women’s action group that worked to improve the status of women “at all levels of the university”; she was involved in establishing a women’s research center in Vancouver outside the university that would provide action-relevant research to women’s organizations (ibid.). Smith also edited a vol- ume providing a feminist critique of psychiatry (Women Look at Psychiatry: I’m Not Mad, I’m Angry, 1975) and began to reread Marx and integrate Marxist ideas into her work, as is reflected in her pamphlet Feminism and Marxism: A Place to Begin, a Way to Go (1977). 3 In 1977, Smith became a professor in the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Here Smith published the works for which she is most well known, including The Everyday World as Problematic (1987), The Conceptual Practices of Power (1990), Texts, Facts, and Femininity (1990), Writing the Social (1999), and, most recently, Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People (2005). In these works, Smith exhorts a powerful feminist theory of what she calls relations of ruling, and she sets out her own approach, which she calls insti- tutional ethnography, as a means for building knowledge as to how the relations of ruling operate from the standpoints of the people participating in them. These pivotal ideas will be discussed further below. 3 Interestingly, Smith (1977:9) maintains that, although she worked as a socialist when she was a young woman in England, it was not until she reread Marx in the 1970s that she came to really understand what Marx meant. |
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