This course is a comprehensive introduction to institutional ethnography (IE), a powerful method of social analysis developed by feminist sociologist, Dorothy E. Smith, Professor Emerita at OISE/UT. IE starts with people's everyday experiences, and provides a way of exploring how the ruling of institutions shape their experiences and practices and lead to the disjunctures that people experience in their everyday lives. The course begins with the epistemology and theoretical traditions that inform IE, discusses IE's core concepts and procedures, examines the major tools associated with IE, and provides opportunities for practice. Explorations will include, but will not be limited to, textual analysis; the overlapping relations of gender, race, class and other axes of difference in organizations; and the combining of institutional ethnography with other critical forms of inquiry such as critical discourse analysis and participatory research. Both Dorothy Smith and George Smith style institutional ethnography are explored, that, is, both institutional ethnography for understanding and institutional ethnography for social change (now commonly known as political activist ethnography).