Project description:
Sara McPhee-Knowles and Jordan Aslett are planning to conduct an Institutional Ethnography (IE) as part of a larger SSHRC-funded project, “A community-based risk assessment framework for Gender-Based Violence in the Yukon.” The purpose of their research is to investigate the ‘work’ involved in responding to gender-based violence within and around worksites in the resource extraction industry. IE, as a methodology, seeks to understand how everyday activities of people are more broadly coordinated by larger Institutional relations. The Yukon has several legal regimes related to personal safety, such as the Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment Board (YESAB), the Yukon Worker’s Safety and Compensation Board, and the Yukon Human Rights Tribunal, all of which have binding regulations pertaining to community safety, assessing and addressing vulnerability, opposing harassment, and stopping violence. However, these legal processes have very specific and often onerous and potentially retraumatizing reporting requirements as well as strict deadlines that are often not trauma informed. All of these regulations and processes are in some ways mediated through texts – which provide a valuable resource (in addition to ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews) to map the work that is carried out by `ordinary’ people when sexual violence occurs in these contexts. This project aims to explore the intersection of these legal processes with people’s lived experiences, using Institutional Ethnography as a methodology for understanding how lived experience and regulatory regimes work together.
Project partner:
Yukon Status of Women Council
Project funders:
SSHRC-WAGE
YukonU Scholarly Activity Grant