As a method of inquiry, Institutional ethnography (IE) provides an analytic tool box to help researchers map social relations and explicate how individuals are governed. IE, at its heart, is about working towards a more equitable society and is analytically concerned with exploring the ways in which power is exerted in practices of ruling. Developed by Canadian feminist scholar Dorothy Smith, this alternative sociology provides a research strategy that allows for an understanding of the socially organized nature of everyday life. IE is committed to discovery and is a highly empirically driven form of social research which draws principally from primary interview, observational, and text-based data sources. This approach to critical social science focuses on the material actualities of people’s lives in order to help develop analytic descriptions of ruling practices.