Intersectionality, Policy‐Oriented Research and the Social Relations of Knowing

Abstract

Researchers attempting to improve knowledge for policy making look to intersectionality to theorize the important, yet poorly understood constitutive elements of people's lives and experiences. As argued here, certain epistemological and ontological issues, while much debated, remain a problem in intersectional and other social research. This paper introduces Dorothy E. Smith's analytic approach, institutional ethnography, arguing that its use avoids reliance on categories that objectify people and, instead, explicates the social relations that rule people's knowing and doing. In institutional ethnography, people are understood to conduct and experience their lives within discursively organized social relations, coordinating their activities with institutions and the political economy, more broadly. Addressing how the latter implicates policy‐oriented activism, an illustration from research in healthcare is used, demonstrating how in accounting empirically for ‘what actually happens’, an institutional ethnography makes visible the relations of knowing that link research subjects and researchers, too, into an institution's ruling purposes.