Suchergebnisse

Combining institutional ethnography and community-based research, Youth Work is a sophisticated examination of the troubling experiences of young people living outside the care of parents or guardians, as well as of the difficulties of the frontline workers who take responsibility for assisting them. Drawing from more than a year of on-site research at an Ontario youth emergency shelter, Naomi Nichols exposes the complicated institutional practices that govern both the lives of young people living in shelters and the workers who try to help them.

In this article, I investigate the social relations of evidence that transverse and connect schools, homes, the streets, and the courts. This institutional ethnography begins in the standpoints of racialised and 'at-risk youth' to investigate how institutional practices – embedded in and constitutive of the new relations of capital and exchange referred to as the knowledge economy – (re)produce intersecting social relations of objectification and exclusion. Beginning with young people's experiences of silencing and misrepresentation in public sector institutions, the article examines how different forms of evidence are produced and used across the various institutional settings where young people are active. The study demonstrates how seemingly objective institutional processes actually produce the experiences of diminishment and exclusion that young people described.

In this article, I reflect on my experiences using institutional ethnography to support socially just policy, practice and organizational change. I focus specifically on three inter-related institutional ethnographic research projects that have informed my approach to working with social workers, shelter workers, lawyers, policy analysts, community organizers, teachers, probation officers and youth to create change. Although strategic collaborations to change institutional practices and knowledge are rife with tensions, I show how institutional ethnography can be used reflexively throughout the collaborative process to create conditions for critical consciousness-raising among participants; inspire reflection and action on the part of human service professionals and inform collective efforts to create systemic change, as well as to guide the research process itself. I conclude by suggesting that institutional ethnographers seeking to influence socially just change need to find ways to balance the demands of academic writing, while being true to the activist origins of this sociological approach.

Abstract. This paper investigates how people's work for non-profit organizations, charities, grassroots collectives, and social justice organizations is organized by official funding processes. In my analysis, I attend to the different kinds of text-based knowledge that coordinate people's work across the civil sector. Engaging in discussions with participants about their work, I discover how an individual's ordinary documentary activities are articulated to institutional relations of accountability. Attending to text-driven accountability practices — practices increasingly taken up to justify and carry out all kinds of work in the civil sector — I investigate the ideological organization of people's work via the policy documents and textual application procedures of the Revenue Canada tax act with regard to Charitable Status and the Ontario Trillium Foundation funding application process.
Résumé. Cette communication s'intéresse aux personnes qui travaillent dans le milieu qui regroupe les organismes à but non-lucratif, les oeuvres de bienfaisance, les collectifs communautaires et les organismes en justice sociale, du point de vue de l'impact exercé sur leur travail par le processus des demandes de financement officiel. Dans mon analyse, je m'attarde à la manière par laquelle une diversité de savoirs textuels vient coordonner ce travail dans l'ensemble du secteur civil. Au moyen de discussions avec participants au sujet de leur travail, je découvre comment les activités normales de documentation qu'effectuent ces individus sont liées à des relations institutionnelles d'obligation de rendre compte. En m'attardant à la primauté du texte vis-à-vis ces comportements d'obligation de rendre compte — comportements qui de plus en plus servent de justification à une gamme importante de fonctions dans le secteur civil — j'enquête sur l'organisation idéologique du travail en question via les documents de politique et de procédure d'application textuelle de la loi de Revenu Canada portant sur le statut caritatif et sur les démarches de demande de soutiel de la Fondation Trillium de l' Ontario.

In this article, we address issues of attribution, utility, and accountability in ethnographic research. We examine the two main analytical approaches that have structured the debate on data collection and theorization in ethnography over the last five decades: an inductivist approach, with grounded theory as its main analytic strategy; and a deductivist stance, which uses field sites to explore empirical anomalies that enable an ethnographer to test and build upon pre-existing theories. We engage recent reformulations of this classical debate, with a specific focus on abductive and reflexive approaches in ethnography, and then weigh into these debates, ourselves. drawing on our own experiences producing and using research in non-academic settings. In so doing, we highlight the importance of strategy and accountability in one's ethnographic practices and accounts, advocating for an approach to ethnographic research that is reflexive and overtly responsive to the knowledge needs and change goals articulated by non-academic collaborators. Ultimately, we argue for a research stance that we describe as tactical responsivity, whereby researchers work with key collaborators and stakeholders to identify the strategic aims and audiences for their research, and develop ethnographic, analytic, and communicative practices that enable them to generate and mobilize the knowledge required to actualize their shared aims.

Using the alternative sociological approach, institutional ethnography, this article reveals how experiences growing up in social housing (re)produce conditions of oppression that exacerbate housing precariousness and other forms of exclusion. Data were generated through participant observation, textual analysis and in-depth qualitative interviews with Young People of Colour living in vulnerable urban neighbourhoods, designated as Neighbourhood Improvement Areas in Toronto, Canada. Findings reveal how discourse, policy and practice related to community safety comprise an institutional nexus, connecting policing with social housing. These intersectional institutional relations create conditions of continuous housing precarity; youth street involvement and homelessness; increased involvement in the youth criminal justice system; and a belief among economically marginalized Young People of Colour that the state does not care about their safety and inclusion.

Despite a rhetorical turn towards prevention in homelessness policy and research, the work of youth homelessness prevention continues to be frustrated by persistent structural barriers. In this article, we examine how youth homelessness prevention is being implemented in the province of Ontario, with a focus on targeted provincial support programs and local shelter diversion practices. Drawing on interviews with workers in the homeless-serving sector, we describe the implementation of these initiatives and identify points of frustration and potential that workers encounter as they try to prevent experiences of homelessness for youth. We contend that these points of frustration illuminate persistent structural barriers that continue to forestall the work of youth homelessness prevention. Meanwhile, points of potential demonstrate the importance of empowering workers to creatively adapt and offer responsive services. Taken together, these signal the critical importance of two aspects of contemporary homelessness prevention typologies—primordial prevention and empowerment. We end by offering aspirations for action, a political reframing of the policy recommendations sections more typical of social science research articles. We do so to affirm our commitment to advancing the work of structural transformation that is required to achieve the right to housing for all, including youth.

AbstractThis article explores the involvement of youth with lived experience (LE) in activism and research aimed at addressing youth homelessness in Canada. Based within a youth‐participatory action research project in Tio'tiá:ke/Montréal, Canada, we reflect on how young people described their own activist organising, as well as the practical ways we may harness actions that homelessness youth are already doing to create communities and solidarity. The authors are members of Youth Action Research Revolution (YARR), a research team primarily made up of youth with LE of homelessness. We position the analysis at an intersection of our own experiences and 63 interviews with youth aged 16–29 conducted by YARR from 2018 to 2021. Conceiving of participatory, youth‐led research as a form of direct action we outline lessons learned from our own research and LE. Young people within our team and participants in YARR's research shared critiques of State systems while outlining the work that they undertook with their peers to act on issues of housing precarity, often eschewing activism aimed at State processes or institutional reform in favour of direct action. This article proposes a mode of fostering youth‐led, socially just change around homelessness—one that shifts conversations from inclusion to solidarity, and recognises the radical potential of research by‐and‐for young people. The authors conclude that research and advocacy on homelessness is always inherently political for young people with LE, and that harnessing the direct action that youth already do to survive is not only a socially just form of mobilising, but can contribute to broader activism towards housing justice.

Advocacy coalitions have played an increasingly critical role in evidence-based policy development. Despite this, little is known about how such coalitions leverage research to influence policy. Addressing this gap, this qualitative study explores how a multi-sectoral advocacy coalition seeks to shape Canadian food security policy through 'solutions-focused advocacy'. We explore four of the coalition's strategies: (1) shaping policymakers' thinking and priorities while responding to governments' needs; (2) utilising research to help governments achieve political 'wins' while advancing the cause; (3) using research to broker relationships between 'community', government, and the coalition; and (4) mobilising research to 'bring the sector along'.

Background: Timely access to relevant and trustworthy research findings is an important facilitator of research use. But the relational aspects of evidence generation, mobilisation and use have been insufficiently explored.
Aims and objectives: Our aim is to describe the strategic communicative and relational work of two intermediary organisations playing thought leadership roles within a large, heterogeneous and loosely configured network comprised of individuals and organisations from the following sectors: academia, frontline service delivery, philanthropic funding, advocacy organisations and government.
Methods: The data for this project were generated as part of a study of the ways social science research influences policy, practice and systems-change processes. Proceeding from the standpoints of people who generate and/or engage with research in an effort to address homelessness in Canada, this article focuses on the intersections of research, strategic communication and policy making.
Findings: Our findings suggest that strategic communication and knowledge exchange play integral roles in efforts to create evidence-based policy change. These communicative activities take the form of public-facing political and/or media engagement strategies, traditional knowledge mobilisation activities and continuous informal and timely exchanges of information between trusted allies.
Discussion and conclusions: Our study reveals the importance of a heterogeneous network structure, with formal and informal alliances between individuals and organisations, as well as key intermediary organisations through which knowledge can be strategically mobilised within the network to serve policy change aims. Furthermore, our study suggests that interest in evidence-led governance is shifting the boundaries between research, advocacy and government action.

Since 2015, Canadian practitioners and funders have been adapting research and development (R&D) principles and practices to the context of social purpose organizations (SPOs) to increase the trans-sectoral capacity to generate social innovations. As a result, Social R&D is rapidly gaining popularity among a diversified array of organizations. This article distills the findings of a mix-methods exploratory study and offers a typology of four different Social R&D conceptualizations and practices. An analysis of the literature and of the empirical findings indicates a general lack of shared understanding about what Social R&D entails as a concept or a process. Further precision of meaning is needed to judge of Social R&D's specific value or to responsibly support its implementation through policy. ; Depuis 2015, un nombre croissant de praticiens et de bailleurs de fonds canadiens adaptent les principes de Recherche et Développement (R&D) aux réalités des organismes à vocation sociale (OVS) afin d'accroître la capacité trans-sectorielle à générer des innovations sociales. Cette démarche a rapidement permis à la R et D sociale de gagner en popularité au- près d'une grande diversité d'organisations. Cet article expose les résultats d'une recherche exploratoire utilisant des méthodes mixtes. Une typologie comportant quatre types de R et D sociale est détaillée. L'analyse combinée de la litté- rature et des données empiriques indique un manque général de compréhension partagée. Des clarifications concep- tuelles additionnelles sont nécessaires afin d'identifier les apports spécifiques de la R et D permettant de justifier son support par la voie de politique publiques.