Institutions, Power & Society

CHRISTIAAN McCANN is an independent personal publishing project that treats everyday life as both material and method. Here you’ll find fragments of personal history, working notes from social work and community projects, and essays that test ideas against lived experience rather than abstract theory alone. The aim is not to offer definitive answers, but to document participation in different social worlds, to observe what actually happens inside institutions and neighbourhoods, and to ask what these encounters might suggest about power, belonging and responsibility. This is a long-term, evolving archive: a place to track experiments, missteps and partial understandings, and to invite readers into a conversation about how we build more honest, participatory and humane communities.

Reading by Classification

Institutions, Power & Society gathers work on how formal structures — schools, agencies, courts, workplaces — meet the people who move through them. Alongside the collection itself, every article here carries a classification: a note on how the material was gathered, not what it proves. Readers may browse by collection, following a single thread of inquiry, or across the archive by classification, following a method instead of a topic.

The two ways of reading are deliberately kept apart. A collection tells you where attention was placed; a classification tells you how close the writing sits to the ground. Neither substitutes for the other, and neither should be mistaken for the kind of evidence a discipline would call settled.

The Five Classifications

Each article is marked with one of the following. The order moves roughly from the most personal vantage point to the most structured — though none of these, including the last, should be read as academic findings.

• Lived Experience — a first-person account, written from inside an institution or encounter, with no claim beyond what was felt and seen.
• Participatory Research — writing produced alongside others, through shared work or shared stakes in an outcome, rather than from a distance.
• Action Research — a deliberate project undertaken to produce a change, with the writing reflecting on what that intervention revealed.
• Longitudinal Observation — notes gathered over an extended period, tracing how a situation or relationship shifted rather than describing a single moment.
• Independent Investigation — a more structured inquiry, drawing on documents, interviews or data alongside direct observation, though still carried out outside any institutional research process.

A word on what these are not: none of the five classifications above is a stand-in for peer-reviewed scholarship. What follows is observation, interpretation and working hypothesis — offered plainly, and held loosely enough to be revised.

Article Index

A selection of research articles from this collection, each marked with its classification.