Social Work Commons^™

Interrogating The Ruling Relations Of Thailand’S Post-Tsunami Reconstruction: Empirically Tracking Social Relations In The Absence Of Conventional Texts, Aaron Williams, Janet Rankin

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

This paper discusses methodological strengths and challenges in doing institutional ethnographic (IE) research in communities devastated by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami in Southern Thailand. IE is a mode of inquiry used to describe institutional mechanisms of reconstruction, aid, and recovery and to show how recovery efforts affected real people and communities over time. The chaotic nature of a disaster zone, combined with the more common difficulties of conducting research in a developing region relying on a translator, posed various challenges in the conduct of this IE study. Textual data, one of the important tools used in IE research, were …