ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the study of institutions within critical resource geography. It focuses on institutional ethnography (IE), a feminist methodology attuned to the microscale, intimate relationships of resource governance. Institutions are constructed through material and discursive social relations; their boundaries are permeable and constituted through subjectivity and daily life. I reflect on my experience undertaking an IE of one institution of resource governance, corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs in the Ecuadorian oil sector. IE begins with critical reflexivity to examine the researcher's positionality and relationship to the institution under study. Methods such as participant observation reveal how institutions operate through strategic embodiments and subjectivities—in this case of my study, through construction of gender identities. In turn, my examination of subject formation occurring within, through, and beyond oil-sector CSR programs disrupts common understandings of institutions by demonstrating their lack of uniformity and coherence across time and space.
