This Much I Know with Professor Eric Mykhalovskiy

Somewhat unexpectedly, an opportunity arose to work with George Smith, one of the founding members of AAN!, on a large research project about access to social services for people living with HIV. I jumped at the chance to become involved. George and I developed a mentor-apprentice relationship; I was the community researcher person on the project.

At the very beginning of the project, George said to me: “There is one condition for your participation in this research: you must not challenge the research method”. The method, I learned, was institutional ethnography (IE), an approach to sociology developed by Dorothy Smith. The approach emphasizes how what Smith calls the “relations of ruling” are put together through people’s activities, particularly as they are mediated across time and place by texts.

Through doing IE in the project and my mentorship with George, I learned about a new kind of sociology. This research project gave me an entry point for thinking about sociology in a less alienating way and I felt there was an opportunity to return to the academy.

George didn’t have a PhD, and although he was widely respected, he knew that there were disadvantages to working without that credential. “With a PhD,” he emphasized, “you will be able to do things you would not be able to do otherwise. You will have a level of academic capital and credibility that will mean your work has the chance to be taken up seriously.” He urged me to use the PhD to support the kind of political work that I thought important.

Unfortunately, George died of HIV-related complications in 1994, before the project finished.

In a book chapter you wrote with Kathryn Church, “Of t-shirts and ontologies: Celebrating George Smith’s pedagogical legacies” , you observe that student activists may not want to do institutional ethnography because they may prefer to study social movements rather than the institutional relations movements struggle against. There are limits to such a focus, you suggest. Can you explain what you mean?

It is not that studying activism is more or less important than studying ruling relations–but there is a difference. There is a way that the training that prevails in sociology, especially at York University, creates an emphasis on theory as an almost apex practice for sociologists and, with it, expectations that one’s research proceeds from the conceptual preoccupations of a recognized body of scholarly literature. In my experience, students with an interest in activism often turn to the social movement literature as a conceptual guide and take up social movements as the object of their analytic attention. Certainly, a lot of important activist scholarship takes this form.

By contrast, institutional ethnographers—and George lays this out in his article on political activist ethnography[1]—begin their work in the standpoint of everyday experience and focus their attention on the institutional relations that social movements confront. In a sense, we study the large-scale problems movements are grappling with.  Rather than study movement strategies or tactics we try to understand how ruling relations are put together so that they can be challenged and transformed.  This means that when you take up IE, you are in a different relationship to the movement—you’re not studying the movement—you’re almost in a kind of service relationship, because you are trying to help activists understand ruling practices that they confront and challenge.

My point is not that taking up IE to do research about ruling relations is better than research on or about social movement activism. Instead, there are different politics and ways of doing research that connect with what questions you are trying to address. I think it’s important for student to ask themselves: How am I related to the movement? How do I orient to creating knowledge with, about, or for the movement?

You have written and, in this interview, spoken about George Smith’s formative influence. He had said to you “don’t challenge me on the method.” Why was he so insistent on the centrality of institutional ethnography? Why did this matter so much for the aims of the project?

There are many schools of sociology and institutional ethnography is one of them. What distinguishes IE is that it is a method informed by a strong feminist and historical materialist theoretical underpinning. There is a way to do IE, which is very different from other schools where there may be a shared theoretical approach but without a unified methodological commitment.

Substantively, a lot of social science research on HIV at the time George and I conducted our study, objectified people.  Scholars were studying the identities of people living with HIV, their suffering, and how they created meaning in and through their experiences of illness. George wanted to do something different. As an institutional ethnography, the study didn’t treat people living with HIV as an object of inquiry. Instead, it began with their experiences and active “work” as a way into exploring the social and institutional processes that shaped their access to social services. In establishing IE as the method, he established the boundaries of our work.

Do you think IE leads to particularly productive scholarship for activists trying to bring about social change? What other approaches have you found useful?

As I mentioned, in the 1990s, there was a lot of extractive research being done about HIV. When I was working at AAN!, researchers would come into our office with their studies they wanted to do: they would plop down their surveys, ask us to find research participants, take what they needed, and be gone. As George was practicing institutional ethnography, he promised something different: we would produce knowledge for communities, knowledge that would be in service of people’s concerns.

But that is where you have to be careful not to oversell. When you are doing research, the whole point is that you do not know what you will find. If you knew, you would not have to do the research. Maybe nothing will come out of your inquiry. When an IE or other study is community-based, you want to be honest with that community about what you hope the research will accomplish and the reality that it may not accomplish as much as you hope.   

The general promise of IE is important: the aim is to produce knowledge about how institutions and systems work, because once you know how they work you can try to change and remake them. In this way, IE is good for producing knowledge based on people’s experiences that can transform the institutional practices to which they are subject. For example, there has been some fantastic institutional ethnographic work done in the U.S. on how domestic violence is processed through the police and court systems. It has led to organizational changes that build women’s safety into how domestic violence is dealt with.[2] Social inquiry, done right and in the right mix of circumstances, can make a difference, even if you cannot promise that at the outset of any research project.

Some activists see the university as an ivory tower, as a place that is not very useful to them, because it is preoccupied with scholarly questions that are less important to community activists. How might you answer activists who see the university in this way?

Certainly, in activist circles, scholarly publications may be viewed as careerist or esoteric. And academic work can be like that! But scholarly research can be very meaningful for activists, depending on the politics scholars engage with and articulate with their academic work.

A good deal of the Canadian research on HIV criminalization has been influenced by IE.  People have been looking at intersecting relations of criminal law and public health from a scholar-activist standpoint and concern for criminal law reform. Early on in that work, we researched criminal cases and determined that people living with HIV with negligible or no risk of HIV transmission were being charged with aggravated sexual assault for HIV non-disclosure.  This, among other factors, led us to be very critical of the use of the criminal law. As researchers and as activists we mobilized our communities and reached out to authorities of various sorts, including politicians, about the need for change.

To try to convince politicians, research was needed that provided evidence related to HIV criminalization. The results of that work have made a difference. First, “hard” science produced evidence that, with successful treatment, people living with HIV posed zero risk of HIV transmission. The Canadian Consensus Statement on HIV and its Transmission in the Context of Criminal Law[3] has been extremely important in establishing this fact and activists have been able to take this evidence to parliamentarians and lawmakers to limit the reach of the criminal law. Second, Canadian researchers have produced a knowledge base about the implications of HIV criminalization for HIV prevention, showing that far from supporting public health, criminalization hinders it.[4] That type of evidence needs to be published in the highest impact scholarly journal you can get, because – whether it should matter or not – being published in highly ranked journals matters to people in power.

Scholarly work can be critical to the persuasive work that is required to inform and change criminal law. We created a body of evidence, and we brought it to lawyers, to court proceedings, and ultimately to the politicians that make and unmake law.

George Smith told you to make the most of your PhD. How do you assess your contributions, as you look back on what is now several decades of scholarly work?

I think my most important contributions have centered on HIV criminalization. There, I can say: yes, my research has made a difference for the better.

Since 2007, when we founded the Ontario Working Group on HIV Criminalization, I’ve worked on this issue politically and in research. There have been many activities—organizing, engaging communities, going to meetings, endless emails, conducting research, writing and publishing, bringing researchers together, mentoring emerging scholars, lobbying politicians—that have added to that political work over a long period of time.

In my experience, academic research does not contribute to quick, direct transformation. My experience is that change takes place over time and not alone but in collaboration. In my case, I have been working with extraordinarily creative and thoughtful lawyers, human rights advocates, people living with HIV, health care providers, and people interested in public health– together –to figure out how to intervene in HIV criminalization. Having a PhD has meant being able to produce research and using that research to shift community perspectives, in meetings with Members of Provincial Parliament, when providing expert testimony in legislative hearings, and before parliamentary committees exploring the issue.

In those respects, not alone, but with other like-minded people, I have tried to realize the spirit of political activist ethnography.  

*Santbir Singh, PhD student in Sociology, prepared questions for the workshop on which this text is based. Charlotte Smith, PhD student in Sociology, took notes and provided the original edit for the article. Professor Elaine Coburn is responsible for final edits along with Professor Eric Mykhalovskiy.

References

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[1] Smith, G. W. (1990). Political activist as ethnographer. Social problems. 37(4), 629-648.

[2] Pence, E. (2001). Safety for battered women in a textually mediated legal system. Studies in Cultures, Organizations and Societies, 7(2), 199-229.

[3] Loutfy, M., Tyndall, M., Baril, J. G., Montaner, J. S., Kaul, R., & Hankins, C. (2014). Canadian consensus statement on HIV and its transmission in the context of criminal law. Canadian Journal of Infectious Diseases and Medical Microbiology, 25(3), 135-140.

[4] Hastings, C., French, M., McClelland, A., Mykhalovskiy, E., Adam, B., Bisaillon, L., ... & Wilson, C. (2024). Criminal Code reform of HIV non-disclosure is urgently needed: Social science perspectives on the harms of HIV criminalization in Canada. Canadian Journal of Public Health, 115(1), 8-14.