Institutional Transformations: Imagination, Embodiment, and Affect

Formal and informal institutions structure our social interactions by giving rise to normative expectations and patterns of collective behaviour. This collection grapples with how affect, imagination, and embodiment can operate to either constrain or enable the justice of institutions and the experiences of specific social identities.

This anthology explores the myriad ways institutions work to systematically disadvantage people with particular identities whilst privileging others, and considers the legal, political, and normative interventions that might serve to promote a more just society. Taken together, the chapters represent the scope of existing research within institutional theory, affect theory, race theory, and theories of social imaginaries. Across a range of topics (human rights, racial and sexual violence, transitional justice and democratic movements) this collection critically assesses the extent to which theorists have attended to the conjoined influence of the imagination, embodiment, and affective phenomena on processes of institutional change that aim to achieve social justice.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Angelaki.

Danielle Celermajer is Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her research focuses on institutional and cultural reforms required for the prevention of human rights violations, responsibility for systematic injustice, and multispecies justice.

Millicent Churcher is Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her research draws together insights from affect and social imaginary studies as well as institutional theory to explore how concrete institutions may constructively engage the imaginations and affects of social agents to achieve social justice outcomes.

Moira Gatens is Challis Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney, Australia. She publishes in the areas of political and feminist philosophy, Spinoza studies, and Philosophy and Literature.