Surgida desde la sociología feminista, hasta ahora la EI no se ha aplicado a las relaciones entre habitantes e intervenciones urbanas, ni tampoco de manera explícita en América Latina.El objetivo del presente artículo es explorar las posibilidades metodológicas de la EI en contextos urbanos, expandiendo de esta manera la creciente exploración metodológica en la investigación urbana. Con este fin, la EI es un modo de acercamiento a los fenómenos sociales que toma como punto de partida las experiencias cotidianas, situadas y incorporadas. Doctor of Philosophy in Interdisciplinary StudiesĮl presente artículo indaga en el enfoque de investigación y metodología de etnografía institucional (EI), la que se centra en develar la forma en que las personas vivencian procesos institucionales de control en la vida cotidiana, cómo se relacionan con complejos institucionales y cómo moldean el continuo de sus vidas cotidianas. I conclude by proposing that in order to change this situation and to counteract the unprecedented number of human rights complaints that have been brought against the Government of Canada for discrimination on the prohibited ground of disability, disabled workers need to follow in the militant footsteps of Canadian First Nations peoples. I also demonstrate that, although federal public service accommodation policies accomplish the legal obligation of the employer not to discriminate against disabled workers, the individualization of accommodations forces disabled workers to take it upon themselves to find ways and means in which to fit into workplaces that have not been designed to meet their needs. I show, further, that the on-line recruitment process used to select employees into the federal public service encodes normality, thereby discriminating against disabled workers. These textually-mediated ruling relations situate the problems that disabled workers encounter in the workplace in their biological makeup, rather than in the Government of Canada’s unwillingness to transform their workplaces to meet the needs of all types of workers, as legislated by the Eldridge and Meiorin Supreme Court of Canada decisions. I also show that the audit-based compliance evaluation process developed by the Canadian Human Rights Commission to safeguard government Departments/Agencies against systemic discrimination actually facilitates discrimination. Starting from the standpoint of disabled employees, I map out what happens when a disabled federal public service employee activates one of these policies.
Using Dorothy Smith’s institutional ethnographic approach to doing research, I explore through interviews with disabled workers how workplace accommodation policies, such as the New Policy on the Duty to Accommodate Employees with Disabilities in the Federal Public Service and the Department of Fearless Advice’s Workplace Accommodation policy, work.