Institutional ethnography and feminist studies of technoscience: The politics of observing Nordic care 1

This chapter explores the politics one performs when using one theory instead of another. Specifically, it unravels how institutional ethnography (IE) and feminist studies of technoscience (FT) allow us to observe. If methods make the normative orders of the field under study, what kinds of (observed) realities might be viewed as politically acceptable? I tackle these questions by combining IE and FT in an effort to discuss how the public Nordic maternity healthcare can be viewed as both controlling and enabling motherhood. Drawing on ethnographic material from Finland, this chapter demonstrates how IE and FT can be combined in a hybrid text in which the theoretical repertoires coexist, although not (always) simultaneously. I conceptualise IE and FT as two modes of ordering in the form of theoretical repertoires that relate to each other but cannot, and need not, be neatly synthesised if one wishes to apply them both. As I show, irreducible differences in ontological commitments boil down to the (in)coherence of institutional agency and power: the political orders observed, and the alternatives arrived at, are different in nature.