ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that following central questions might be addressed methodologically by reading policy and its practice "along the grain"—by reading ethnographically for dynamic patterns of interpretation and power production: who speaks and on behalf of whom and how are ghostly subjects produced and what do they tell us about the flow of power. It examines a particular Institutional Review Board (IRB) decision as an analytical point of entry for ethnographic considerations of policy. The chapter considers an ethnographic reading along the grain of state and institutional policy practice. It describes both a specific ethnography of policy and ethnography of the hauntings of policy as they pertain to this local instance of the practice of policy. The chapter explores the representations and reproductions of literacy, race, citizenship, and knowledge, and how those representations and reproductions both blighted research and created ghost subjects. In the textual field, literacy emerges as an artery of power.
