Drawing on my Ph.D. research into everyday eating in the aftermath of Tokyo Electric Power Company’s 2011 nuclear disaster, in this chapter I propose vital institutional ethnography as a method of inquiry for studying how ruling relations are enacted in response to a messy trouble of the Anthropocene. Borrowing sensibilities from both institutional ethnography and material semiotics, vital institutional ethnography encourages scholars to trace textually-mediated ruling relations their study participants are embedded within, while simultaneously attending to the materiality of pollutants and other human and more-than-human entanglements contributing to situated experiences of disorder. Through theoretical discussions and examples from my Ph.D. thesis, I illustrate how vital institutional ethnography offers an opportunity for scholars to creatively attend to questions of social justice and response-ability when researching messy, uneven experiences and realities, and to discover innovative ways of grappling with some of the most perplexing challenges we face in the Anthropocene.
