Dorothy E. Smith
Developed institutional ethnography, a feminist sociological method that examines social relations from the standpoint of women's everyday experiences.
Quotes by Dorothy E. Smith
A sociology for women would be a sociology that would make it possible for women to understand the world and to act in it.
The standpoint of women is not a natural given, but an achievement, a product of struggle and critical reflection.
The everyday world is the site of our experience, the place where we live and work, where we raise our children, where we engage in social relations.
Sociology, as it has been constituted, has been a sociology for men, by men, and about men.
The problem is not simply to add women to existing sociological categories, but to transform those categories themselves.
The ruling relations are those relations that organize and coordinate the activities of people across time and space.
The text is a site of power, a place where meanings are constructed and contested.
Knowledge is not a neutral reflection of reality, but a social construct, shaped by power relations.
The institutional ethnography is a method of inquiry that begins with people's everyday experiences and traces them into the institutional processes that organize and shape those experiences.
The goal of institutional ethnography is to make visible the invisible workings of power.
The personal is political, and the political is personal.
We must begin our sociological inquiry from the standpoint of women, from their lived experiences.
The ruling apparatus is not a monolithic entity, but a complex of intersecting and overlapping relations.
The everyday world is not simply a reflection of larger social structures, but a site of their ongoing production and reproduction.
To understand the social world, we must attend to the particularities of people's lives.
The dominant discourse often obscures the experiences of those who are marginalized.
Our task as sociologists is to make visible what is ordinarily invisible.
The standpoint of women offers a unique vantage point from which to critique existing social arrangements.
The social world is not a given, but a constantly negotiated and contested terrain.
Power is not simply repressive, but also productive; it shapes our understandings of the world.