This dissertation is the first ever written Institutional Ethnography (IE) of the Asignación Universal por Hijo para Protección Social, or "AUH" [Universal Child Allowance], Argentina's CCT (conditional cash transfer) program. CCTs are one of international development's favourite and fastest-growing anti-poverty initiatives. Through the AUH, the State transfers cash to the poor attaching certain conditions that refer to the health and education of their children. Most CCT programs target women, and the AUH is no exception, as the overwhelming majority of legal recipients of the AUH are poor mothers. CCTs have been praised for contributing to human capital accumulation and empowering women. Using IE, a feminist socio-legal methodology drawn from Canadian sociologist Dorothy Smith,† I conducted research with a total of fifty-eight informants: thirty-nine AUH recipient women - through in-depth semi-structured individual interviews, focus group discussions, and narrative photovoice - and nineteen professionals working at diverse corners of the AUH institution. I use the findings to answer two main questions: (1) What are AUH recipients' experiences with and attitudes toward the program? and (2) How do both State and non-State legal regimes work to influence the lives of the most vulnerable women in Argentina? In other words, how does the AUH play within a system of rules - formal and informal - that have traditionally exerted control over poor women? Following IE and Social Reproduction Feminism (SRF), I found that while the AUH program indicates women's decision-making roles within their families and communities, this policy initiative serves to entrench rather than rectify inequalities. The problematic that I have found through this study is administrative and obstetric violence against AUH recipient women. Discussion about the administrative and obstetric violence that AUH recipient women suffer while doing AUH work has remained at the margins of legal and social policy debates, generally underdeveloped in policy and scholarship conversations about the realities of Argentina's most vulnerable people. Recipient women depicted diverse acts of violence they suffered while doing AUH work: they were mistreated, dismissed, neglected, humiliated, and discriminated against by State agents; recipient women were treated as ignorant or infantilized; recipient women had their stipend partially stolen by bureaucrats; had to wait countless hours in unsafe conditions; were not heard by health actors when expressing concerns about their health; had no opportunity to give prior informed consent; and they faced barriers to accessing health services and contraception. I have found a disjuncture between women's lived experiences and the broader ruling relations that organize "AUH work." The findings show a disconnection between women's experiences of violence, bureaucratic actors' experiences and knowledge of the AUH, and a misalignment between bureaucrats' knowledge and the black-letter law. These disjunctures enable and facilitate violence against recipient women through fragmentation, invisibilization, rationalization, minimization, standardization, and objectification of women's experiences. In sum, the AUH facilitates violence against women and systematically obscures that violence. Following a legal pluralist approach, I show the complex role of the law: at times, it problematically excludes recipient women's actual experiences from the AUH legal framework; at others, it fails to protect recipient women against violence. I identify the formal legal regimes interacting and immersed in the AUH institution: human rights and constitutional law, administrative law, and the violence against women (VAW) legal framework. Despite an outstanding formal repertoire of rights, there is a gap between the formal laws and their effective translation into women's lives. The law is fragmented, complex, and sometimes contradictory. It cannot be limited to State-enacted formal laws; informal laws substantially impact people's lives, such as the rule to avoid retaliation from State actors by avoiding complaining. I argue that IE and legal pluralism can provide a more nuanced understanding of the law's complex institutional hierarchy and of the myriad ways by which recipient women's voices continue to be ignored and discredited within the law in the hope that the law can better respond (or at least stops interfering) with their needs. Ultimately, nothing less than the transformation of the socioeconomic order will achieve gender equality. Rather than "empowerment," we should strive toward emancipation, abolishing the structural colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist foundations of exploitation and oppression instead of integrating women into existing institutions and "empowering" them with shallow cash transfers.

Through the small-scale and imaginative application of a Speculative Institutional Ethnographical study, fictionalised stories have been created based upon observations in the field at three different Youth Care Home Facilities in Sweden. The locations and characters in these stories are composite narratives comprised of actual details from multiple real life places and people, amalgamated to form fictionalised narratives so as to protect the anonymity of real life people. The researcher’s primary motivation with the research is to develop a better understanding of the way in which individual differences between staff members working at these facilities impact their decision making in an environment which is supposedly value-neutral. It is argued that a multitude of factors will influence staff members perceptions of youths at these homes and that a degree of bias or partiality is unavoidable. An awareness of this and a development of critical reflexivity is encouraged. Through drawing data from real life observations in the field to create credible, realistic fictionalised stories, the research project is combining academic and creative writing processes in an innovative and progressive way. The goal of the research is not to prove or disprove a specific hypothesis but rather to explore an issue and develop a better understanding of the complexity and nuances of working at a Youth Care Home facility in view of Intersectional Gender Studies.

This dissertation focuses on a recent but growing movement in Argentina, state-sponsored formal institutions of popular music education. The musics taught in these schools – tango, jazz, and Argentine folk idioms – have historically been excluded from the country’s formal music education systems. Recent moves to standardize and legitimize these musics in this new institutional context raise questions of canon formation, pedagogical praxis, aesthetics and musical meaning that have implications far beyond the classrooms where they are implemented. I examine two of these schools based in and around the capital city of Buenos Aires: the Escuela de Música Popular de Avellaneda, and the Tango and Folklore department of the Conservatorio Superior de Música “Manuel de Falla.” I adopt an ethnographic approach that considers broad structural and policy issues of power distribution, state intervention, and cultural nationalism. I also examine how these structures play out in discourse and practice within and beyond the classroom, shaped by and in turn shaping students’ and teachers’ aesthetics, politics, and subject positions. I then analyze the output of several musical groups composed of current students and recent graduates of these programs, exploring the notion of an emerging institutional aesthetic and the extent to which these institutions act as homogenizing influences or engender creative divergence. Finally, applying Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of a field of cultural production, I question the extent to which this new “música popular” is truly popular, ultimately arguing that it occupies a sort of third space between mass culture and high culture, replicating some avant-garde assumptions about the role of art as anti-commercial, yet simultaneously embracing a symbolic economy that valorizes populist and subaltern identities and ideologies. / text

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Made available in DSpace on 2014-12-17T15:40:36Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 VeronicaSP_tese.pdf: 577201 bytes, checksum: e41ce8fd26195606f8650fbf1d39f279 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007-09-27 / Coordena??o de Aperfei?oamento de Pessoal de N?vel Superior / The proposal of the Unified Health System Policy (SUS) has been considered one of the most democratic public policies in Brazil. In spite of this, its implementation in a context of social inequalities has demanded significant efforts. From a socio-constructionist perspective on social psychology, the study focused on the National Policy for Permanent Education in Health for the Unified Health System (SUS), launched by the Brazilian government in 2004, as an additional effort to improve practices and accomplish the effective implementation of the principles and guidelines of the Policy. Considering the process of permanent interdependencies between these propositions and the socio-political and cultural context, the study aimed to identify the discursive constructions articulated in the National Policy for Permanent Education in Health for the Unified Health System (SUS) and how they fit into the existing power relations of ongoing Brazilian socio-political context. Subject positionings and action orientation offered to different social actors by these discursive constructions and the kind of practices allowed were also explored, as well as the implementation of the proposal in Rio Grande do Norte state and how this process was perceived by the people involved. The information produced by documental analyses, participant observation and interviews was analyzed as proposed by Institutional Ethnography. It evidenced the inter-relations between the practices of different social actors, the conditions available for those practices and the interests and power relations involved. Discontinuities on public policies in Brazil and the tendency to prioritize institutional and personal interests, in detriment of collective processes of social transformation, were some of obstacles highlighted by participants. The hegemony of the medical model and the individualistic and curative intervention practices that the model elicits were also emphasized as one of the drawbacks of the ongoing system. Facing these challenges, reflexivity and dialogism appear as strategies for a transformative action, making possible the denaturalization of ongoing practices, as well as the values and tenets supporting them / Uma das mais significativas propostas de democratiza??o no campo das pol?ticas p?blicas no Brasil, o Sistema ?nico de Sa?de (SUS) vem demandando grandes esfor?os visando sua efetiva implementa??o, em um contexto de gritantes desigualdades sociais. Adotando o referencial da psicologia social de orienta??o s?cio-construcionista, o estudo enfocou a Pol?tica de Educa??o e Desenvolvimento para o SUS, oficializada em 2004, como mais uma tentativa de mudan?a das pr?ticas setoriais para efetiva??o dos princ?pios e diretrizes do SUS. Considerando as interdepend?ncias entre as referidas proposi??es e o contexto s?cio-pol?tico e cultural, o estudo objetivou identificar as constru??es discursivas pr?prias da Pol?tica de Educa??o e Desenvolvimento para o SUS, considerando as posi??es de sujeito e as possibilidades de a??o que ela oferece e o tipo de pr?ticas que as constru??es discursivas promovem, no confronto com o cotidiano dos servi?os de sa?de. A implementa??o dessa proposta de transforma??o no Estado do Rio Grande do Norte e a forma como est?o sendo percebidas pelas pessoas envolvidas, foram tamb?m estudadas em profundidade. A an?lise das informa??es, geradas atrav?s de consulta documental, observa??o participante e entrevistas, desvelou as inter-rela??es entre as pr?ticas dos diversos atores, as condi??es de exerc?cio das mesmas e os interesses e rela??es de poder, locais e translocais, em jogo, segundo a proposta metodol?gica da Etnografia Institucional. A descontinuidade das pol?ticas p?blicas no Brasil, a prioriza??o de interesses institucionais e pessoais, em detrimento dos processos de constru??o coletiva de pr?ticas transformadoras, al?m da desresponsabiliza??o dos envolvidos com a efetiva??o das propostas, foram alguns dos entraves evidenciados. A hegemonia do modelo biom?dico no conjunto da sociedade, e as pr?ticas individuais e curativas dele derivadas foram criticadas de forma contundente. A reflexividade e o dialogismo emergiram como estrat?gias para uma a??o transformadora, propiciando a desnaturaliza??o das pr?ticas vigentes e dos valores e pressupostos que as sustentam

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My research studies immigrants’ learning experiences as socially organized practices. Informed by the sociocultural approach of learning and institutional ethnography, I treat learning as a material and relational phenomenon. I start by examining how fourteen Chinese immigrants learn to fit into the engineering market in Canada. I then trace the social discourses and relations that shape immigrants’ learning experiences, particularly their changing perceptions and practices and personal and professional investments. I contend that immigrants’ learning is produced through social processes of differentiation that naturalize immigrants as a secondary labour pool, which is dismissible and desirable at the same time. My investigation unfolds around four areas of learning. The first is related to immigrants’ self-marketing practices. I show that core to immigrants’ marketing strategies is to speak to the skill discourse or employers’ skill expectations at the “right” time and place. The skill discourse, I argue, is culturally-charged and class-based. It cloaks a complex of hiring relations where “skill” is discursively constructed and differentially invoked to preserve the privilege and power of the dominant group. The second area is immigrants’ work-related learning. I find that workplace training is part of the corporate agenda to organize work and manage workers. Amid this picture, workers’ opportunity to access corporate sponsorship for professional development is contingent on their membership within the engineering community. To expand their professional space, the immigrants resorted to learning and consolidating their knowledge in codes and standards, which serve as a textual organizer of engineering work. The third area is related to workplace communication. My participants reported an individualistic communication ‘culture’, which celebrates individual excellence and discourages close interpersonal relations. Such a perception, I argue, obscures the gender, race and class relations that privilege white and male power. It also leaves out the organizational relations, such as the project-based deployment of the engineering workforce that perpetuate individualistic communicative practices. My last area of investigation focuses on immigrants’ efforts to acquire Canadian credentials and professional licence. Their heavy learning loads direct my attention to the ideological and administrative licensure practices that valorize Canadian credentials and certificates to the exclusion of others.

In this study I explore the social organization of community gardening in Toronto. I have done this by: exploring (a) the experiences of community garden coordinators hired by non-profit organizations do to improve poor Torontonians’ access to food, and how this work occurs within and is affected by the larger framework of (b) the City of Toronto’s Community Gardens Program. This inquiry was carried out using institutional ethnography, with data collection occurring through open-ended interviews with garden coordinators and the analysis of non-profit and municipal documents. The results of the study are that garden coordinator’s work to improve access to food for poor Torontonians is at odds with the municipal understanding of community gardens and park space existing to attract economic investment to Toronto via “creative professionals.”

In this study I explore the social organization of community gardening in Toronto. I have done this by: exploring (a) the experiences of community garden coordinators hired by non-profit organizations do to improve poor Torontonians’ access to food, and how this work occurs within and is affected by the larger framework of (b) the City of Toronto’s Community Gardens Program. This inquiry was carried out using institutional ethnography, with data collection occurring through open-ended interviews with garden coordinators and the analysis of non-profit and municipal documents. The results of the study are that garden coordinator’s work to improve access to food for poor Torontonians is at odds with the municipal understanding of community gardens and park space existing to attract economic investment to Toronto via “creative professionals.”