INSTITUTIONAL TRANSFORMATIONS

The idea that social and political institutions can be designed in order to achieve specific human ends goes back, at least, to Plato’s presentation of the appropriate form of the just city-state in the Republic. Since then, scholars from numerous traditions and disciplines have analysed how laws and norms function to distribute social, cultural, and natural resources, and to organize relationships within the field of their operation, thereby both constraining and enabling human action. Transform an institution by changing laws, or challenging dominant norms, and it is likely that the scope for social action and the shape of social relations will also shift. Building on this tradition, the papers in this special issue explore how particular legal, political, and normative interventions into existing institutions might serve to promote a more just society.

Our authors adopt a broad understanding of institutions as embodied, organizing frameworks that can take the form of explicit or tacit rules, norms, codes, and sedimented practices. Just as schools, media, workplaces, and law may be understood as institutions, so too may race, gender, and sexuality. Formal and informal institutions structure our social interactions by giving rise to normative expectations and patterns of collective behaviour. This makes them indispensable to the ability to navigate social and political environments. Yet, as the papers in this issue demonstrate, institutions can work in myriad ways to systematically disadvantage people with particular identities whilst privileging others, and their influence can overlap in ways that serve to consolidate unjust arrangements.

Our framing of institutions positions at centre stage the influence of embodiment and affect in structuring the ability of individuals and groups to flourish in various social and material settings, and their motivational set to drive, or resist, change. The essays in this issue are interested in questions concerning how emotional and habituated dispositions among differently embodied identities contribute to maintaining injustice. Our contributors recognize that these dispositions are necessarily bound up with habits of imagination and perception, which are themselves embedded in and structured by wider social imaginaries, conceived as clusters of affect-laden scripts, images, and practices. The challenge of the essays featured here is to explore how new imaginative forms and the cultivation of new sensibilities can contribute to institutional transformations in ways that enhance justice.

Issue image: Paul Klee, Kamel (in rhythm. Baumlandschaft).