Papers by Janna Klostermann
Studies in Social Justice, 2020
This article revisits activist ethnographer George W. Smith's intellectual and political legacy, ... more This article revisits activist ethnographer George W. Smith's intellectual and political legacy, with a focus on his engagement with and conception of "life work." In the context of the AIDS crisis in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Smith contributed to reframing the way in which AIDS was problematized and confronted. Rather than treating people living with HIV/AIDS as "disease vectors" to be isolated from the general population, as had been the case under the prevailing public health regime, he started his research and organizing from the standpoint of people living with HIV/AIDS-investigating the everyday work that they did in accessing the services that they needed in order to survive. Drawing from archival research, activist interviews and his published works, this article traces how Smith deployed the concept of life work in his research as part of the "Hooking Up" Project, in his public writing in the gay and lesbian press, and in his organizing with AIDS ACTION NOW! in Toronto. Beyond the reproductive labour of individuals in accessing particular politico-administrative regimes, which Smith focused on in his research, we explore how life work can be theorized more broadly to include collective efforts to confront social, biomedical and institutional barriers to living. Hence, in considering Smith's AIDS activism, we argue that his theorizing and political organizing, taken together, should themselves be seen as forms of life work.
Canadian Review of Sociology, 2020
Seeking to support graduate students in engaging in feminist sociological research, we provide gu... more Seeking to support graduate students in engaging in feminist sociological research, we provide guidance on “working the project”—working collaboratively and creatively to foster compassion and solidarity as we bring diverse research projects to fruition. We offer reflections on our everyday experiences and struggles as emerging feminist researchers, including with writing research proposals. We also include four condensed research proposals ‐ on the social organization of care work, sex work, criminal justice, and abortion care ‐ to support fellow students in the process. Spurring collaborative, fun and inclusive ways of working, we speak to feminist scholar‐activists who may require additional support in navigating the social relations of academe, while contributing to collective projects of investigating and remaking the social organization of everyday life.
Culture and Organization, 2019
This article considers the possibilities and limits of applying institutional ethnography, a femi... more This article considers the possibilities and limits of applying institutional ethnography, a feminist theoretical and methodological approach that contributes to collective projects of investigating and transforming social life. Elaborating on the approach, the article reports on an ethnographic exploration of visual artists’ experiences and struggles in Canada’s art world – a project that started from the standpoint of practising visual artists, examined their work and relations, and explicated practices and logics of art and valued work conditioning their lives. Speaking back to formal or text-based investigations of particular institutions, the article grapples with how to engage in research that more fully reveals the ‘social,’ attending to everyday life, to the ‘life work’ that people do, and to social forms that are threaded through intersecting, localized intimate and institutional spheres.
Ethnography and Education, 2018
This research reveals the social relations of the art world through an investigation of visual ar... more This research reveals the social relations of the art world through an investigation of visual artists’ ordinary art-making practices. Drawing on extended ethnographic research, the article attends to art and ordinary work, clarifying how visual artists’ work, is not only shaped socially and historically, but also reveals tensions about what counts as art and who counts as an artist. The article clarifies how today’s art world valorises conceptual approaches – centred on mobilising concepts and ideas, while devaluing expressivist approaches – centred on accessing intuition or inspiration. The article makes visible an increasingly conceptual, academic art world in which an expressivist practice is harder to sustain. By tracing shifting forms of work and shifting social relations, the study contributes to educational research on art, while calling attention to organisational processes that deeply shape artists’ lives.
KEYWORDS: Artists, feminist ethnography, social organisation, work
This essay responds to the recent " Statement on Writing Centres and Staffing " (Graves, 2016), m... more This essay responds to the recent " Statement on Writing Centres and Staffing " (Graves, 2016), making visible differing conceptualizations of writing in it. More particularly, I will make visible traces of the statement that position writing as a measurable skill, aligning with the priorities of university administrators, and traces of the statement that position writing as a complex social practice, aligning with the needs of student writers and writing centre tutors/specialists. I trouble understandings of writing that maintain the university as a site of exclusion, while pushing for future contributions that take seriously the everyday, on the ground work of student writers and writing centre tutors/specialists.
This study examines the social organisation of Canada‟s art
world from the standpoint of practisi... more This study examines the social organisation of Canada‟s art
world from the standpoint of practising visual artists. Bringing
together theories of literacy and institutional ethnography, the article
investigates the literacy practices of visual artists, making visible how
artists use written texts to participate in public galleries and in the art
world. Drawing on extended ethnographic research, including
interviews, observational field notes and textual analyses, the study
sheds light on the ways visual artists enact particular texts, enact
organisational processes, and enact the social and institutional worlds
they are a part of. Through the lens of visual artists, the study locates
two particular texts – the artist statement and the bio statement – in
the extended social and institutional relations of the art world.
Research objectives. In Ontario, the last remaining state-run institutions for people with develo... more Research objectives. In Ontario, the last remaining state-run institutions for people with developmental disabilities closed in 2009. 'Shared living' arrangements, which see live-in caregivers residing with and supporting people with developmental disabilities, are increasingly the picture of care in Canadian and international contexts . However, there has been limited sociological inquiry into the running of these smaller and less formal residential settings or into the experiences of livein caregivers providing support. Care scholars are urging for inquiries that take the standpoint of live-in caregivers , and that examine how ongoing relations of vulnerability are negotiated in these contemporary care settings . Motivated by three years of experience serving as a live-in caregiver, my doctoral research uses institutional ethnography (IE) to investigate the social organization of care from the standpoint of live-in caregivers. The following questions guide my discovery process:
Reading Sociology: Canadian Perspectives (3rd Edition), 2017
This chapter reports on my institutional ethnographic research into Canada’s art world – making v... more This chapter reports on my institutional ethnographic research into Canada’s art world – making visible how the everyday work of artists and curators brings about the institutions they are a part of while, at times, marginalizing particular experiences.
This exhibition explores AIDS activists' work to eroticize safer sex practices in Canada in the l... more This exhibition explores AIDS activists' work to eroticize safer sex practices in Canada in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Eroticizing was a personal and political intervention. It was a way of refusing to see "sex-crazed, 'promiscuous,' bath-going gay men" as a problem and refusing to push for monogamous "political correct" relationships.
Thesis Chapters by Janna Klostermann
Carleton University, 2020
What exactly keeps women ‘in’ inequitable care relationships, and how do we get ‘out’? This disse... more What exactly keeps women ‘in’ inequitable care relationships, and how do we get ‘out’? This dissertation offers a timely response to a pressing societal problem – that of how to understand and organize care. Feminist scholarship and debates focus on the redistribution of care, considering how to shift care responsibilities from women to men or from individuals to the state. My research expands this work by critically reflecting on (shifting) relationships between women and the care economy with a focus on the moral dimensions of care work and on the narrative, intrasubjective work that women do.
The research mobilizes sociological theories of care work, gender and moral worth, and uses feminist life history and arts-based, auto-ethnographic methods to contribute to a conceptual reimagining of “care.” Taking an interpretive, narrative, feminist approach, I draw on 20 in-depth life history interviews with 12 participants, as well as on my own autoethnographic experiences as a live-in care worker at L’Arche. I analyze how women narrate renegotiating care responsibilities or expectations across our lives and in different paid and unpaid care contexts in Ontario, Canada. Making links to class, gender and conditions in the caring economy, the project contextualizes women’s narratives of orienting to projects of care, negotiating moral dilemmas at the limits of care, and stepping back from or renegotiating care responsibilities.
The study enriches feminist theories of care by developing a theorized account of the “relational care economy” that makes intrasubjective conditions, and the contradictions that people negotiate, central. I also contribute to a conceptual reimagining of “care” both by raising questions about whether “care as an ethic” should apply at the level of individual women’s lives, as well as by calling for a conception of care that makes limits central. Aiming to foster solidarity amongst carers in different roles, I ask tough questions about what we expect of ourselves and others, how we can stop setting women up for such intimate losses, and how our lives can be otherwise.
Complete journal issues by Janna Klostermann
Interface: a journal for and about social movements, 2021
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Papers by Janna Klostermann
KEYWORDS: Artists, feminist ethnography, social organisation, work
world from the standpoint of practising visual artists. Bringing
together theories of literacy and institutional ethnography, the article
investigates the literacy practices of visual artists, making visible how
artists use written texts to participate in public galleries and in the art
world. Drawing on extended ethnographic research, including
interviews, observational field notes and textual analyses, the study
sheds light on the ways visual artists enact particular texts, enact
organisational processes, and enact the social and institutional worlds
they are a part of. Through the lens of visual artists, the study locates
two particular texts – the artist statement and the bio statement – in
the extended social and institutional relations of the art world.
Thesis Chapters by Janna Klostermann
The research mobilizes sociological theories of care work, gender and moral worth, and uses feminist life history and arts-based, auto-ethnographic methods to contribute to a conceptual reimagining of “care.” Taking an interpretive, narrative, feminist approach, I draw on 20 in-depth life history interviews with 12 participants, as well as on my own autoethnographic experiences as a live-in care worker at L’Arche. I analyze how women narrate renegotiating care responsibilities or expectations across our lives and in different paid and unpaid care contexts in Ontario, Canada. Making links to class, gender and conditions in the caring economy, the project contextualizes women’s narratives of orienting to projects of care, negotiating moral dilemmas at the limits of care, and stepping back from or renegotiating care responsibilities.
The study enriches feminist theories of care by developing a theorized account of the “relational care economy” that makes intrasubjective conditions, and the contradictions that people negotiate, central. I also contribute to a conceptual reimagining of “care” both by raising questions about whether “care as an ethic” should apply at the level of individual women’s lives, as well as by calling for a conception of care that makes limits central. Aiming to foster solidarity amongst carers in different roles, I ask tough questions about what we expect of ourselves and others, how we can stop setting women up for such intimate losses, and how our lives can be otherwise.
Complete journal issues by Janna Klostermann
KEYWORDS: Artists, feminist ethnography, social organisation, work
world from the standpoint of practising visual artists. Bringing
together theories of literacy and institutional ethnography, the article
investigates the literacy practices of visual artists, making visible how
artists use written texts to participate in public galleries and in the art
world. Drawing on extended ethnographic research, including
interviews, observational field notes and textual analyses, the study
sheds light on the ways visual artists enact particular texts, enact
organisational processes, and enact the social and institutional worlds
they are a part of. Through the lens of visual artists, the study locates
two particular texts – the artist statement and the bio statement – in
the extended social and institutional relations of the art world.
The research mobilizes sociological theories of care work, gender and moral worth, and uses feminist life history and arts-based, auto-ethnographic methods to contribute to a conceptual reimagining of “care.” Taking an interpretive, narrative, feminist approach, I draw on 20 in-depth life history interviews with 12 participants, as well as on my own autoethnographic experiences as a live-in care worker at L’Arche. I analyze how women narrate renegotiating care responsibilities or expectations across our lives and in different paid and unpaid care contexts in Ontario, Canada. Making links to class, gender and conditions in the caring economy, the project contextualizes women’s narratives of orienting to projects of care, negotiating moral dilemmas at the limits of care, and stepping back from or renegotiating care responsibilities.
The study enriches feminist theories of care by developing a theorized account of the “relational care economy” that makes intrasubjective conditions, and the contradictions that people negotiate, central. I also contribute to a conceptual reimagining of “care” both by raising questions about whether “care as an ethic” should apply at the level of individual women’s lives, as well as by calling for a conception of care that makes limits central. Aiming to foster solidarity amongst carers in different roles, I ask tough questions about what we expect of ourselves and others, how we can stop setting women up for such intimate losses, and how our lives can be otherwise.