Tracing ‘the Social’ in Processes of Rural Development in Kyrgyzstan

Abstract

A common concern in the study of development policy and discourse has been the question of what is ‘the social’ in social policy? With this in mind, my research is premised on the idea that development policy is a social relation that can be grasped ethnographically in the work that people do to interpret and enact it. Using the example of ‘adult education’, I employ institutional ethnography (IE) to illuminate how work processes across a broad range of interrelated sites come to be coordinated with and by a distinct set of relations located elsewhere. Explicating the concept of ‘adult education’ as a social process that can be grasped in the day-to-day work of grant writing, allows me to bring to view the standardizing practices that organize grant writing, and how these practices perform a depoliticizing function by precluding alternative practices and functions from entering the scope of what can legitimately be imagined.