Dorothy Edith Smith (née Place; 6 July 1926 – 3 June 2022) was a British-born Canadian ethnographer, feminist studies scholar, sociologist, and writer with research interests in a variety of disciplines. These include women's studies, feminist theory, psychology, and educational studies. Smith is also involved in certain subfields of sociology, such as the sociology of knowledge, family studies, and methodology. She founded the sociological sub-disciplines of feminist standpoint theory and institutional ethnography. Biography Smith was born on 6 July 1926, in Northallerton, North Riding of Yorkshire, England, to Dorothy F. Place and Tom Place, who also had three sons. Her mother was a university-trained chemist who had been engaged in the women's suffrage movement as a young woman and her father was a timber merchant. One of her brothers, Ullin Place, was known for his work on consciousness as a process of the brain, and another was poet Milner Place. Smith did her undergraduate work at the London School of Economics, earning her B.Sc. in sociology with a major in social anthropology in 1955. She then married William Reid Smith, whom she had met while attending LSE, and they moved to the United States. They both attended graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, where she received her Ph.D. in sociology in 1963, nine months after the birth of their second child. Not long afterward she and her husband were divorced; she retained custody of the children. She then taught as a lecturer at UC Berkeley from 1964 to 1966. Smith started teaching sociology, and was the only female teacher in a faculty of 44. Following the divorce, Smith was lacking in day care and family support while trying to raise her two children alone and as a result decided to move back to England in the late 60s. While she was there she gave lectures on sociology at the University of Essex, Colchester. In 1968, Smith moved with her two sons to Vancouver, British Columbia to teach at the University of British Columbia, where she helped to establish a Women's Studies Program. In 1977 she moved to Toronto, Ontario to work at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, where she lived until she retired. In 1994 she became an adjunct professor at the University of Victoria, where she continued her work in institutional ethnography. Smith served on the international advisory board for the feminist journal Signs. Smith