Institutional Critique Research Articles

Collaboration as a Form of Institutional Critique: Teaching and Learning in the Wake of Anti-DEI Legislation

How do we move forward when the legality of teaching and learning about social justice research is called into question by the state? This article demonstrates the efficacy of collaboration as a form of institutional critique that made it possible to provide a comprehensive graduate education following the emergence of anti-DEI legislation in Florida. To teach and learn in a tumultuous legal landscape without sacrificing rigor, eliding DEI-oriented scholarship, or violating state law, we piloted a collaborative disciplinary meta-analysis project that enabled students to study social justice research along with the field’s other major research topics. This portable approach allowed us to meet the professional and ethical imperative to engage research that has been targeted by state officials but remains foundational for disciplinary expertise. It also demonstrates the futility of removing politically unfavorable scholarship from curricula. After sharing an overview of the results of our meta-analysis project, with a special focus on our field’s take on social justice and collaboration, we reflect on the rhetorical strategies those of us working in highly politicized educational climates have deployed to manage increased oversight from zealous state legislatures challenging the legitimacy of disciplinary expertise.

Embodied Cognition in Dark Times

Michelle Maiese and Robert Hanna’s The Mind-Body Politic sets out to combine both the philosophy of essentially embodied cognition (EEM) and emancipatory political theory to put forth a “new critique of contemporary social institutions.” There remains, however, an explanatory gap between the general, normative foundations of their approach in EEM, and the particular critiques of neoliberalism and the alternative presented. This paper explores an alternative totalitarian pathway (as understood by Arendt) that such general EEM normativity might lead us, as a friendly invitation for further elaboration on the normative basis of MBP’s critiques of—and proposed alternative to—neoliberal institutions.

Violence and Gender Conflicts in Ian McEwan’s novel The Comfort of Strangers

This essay examines the themes of violence and gender conflicts in Ian McEwan's The Comfort of Strangers, emphasising how conventional gender roles and power dynamics add to the unnerving atmosphere of the novel. The novel, which takes place in an unfamiliar and enigmatic city, centres on two couples: Robert and Caroline and Colin and Mary, whose interactions highlight the damaging effects of patriarchal norms. Robert, a character in the novel who represents the dehumanising impacts of inflexible gender standards by his cruel actions towards Caroline, serves as a critique of toxic masculinity. The novel's depictions of psychological and physical violence highlight the risks associated with relationships in which power is unequally divided. How McEwan depicts victimisation and complicity in love relationships provides a disturbing critique of the social institutions that support and condone gender-based violence. In the end, the essay makes the case that the novel is a potent indictment of how patriarchal beliefs influence and frequently twist interpersonal relationships.

Becoming killable – meatpacking and kinship among covid-19

ABSTRACT In the early months of Covid-19, meatpacking plants were designated “essential” infrastructure, sending laborers back to work, despite the high risk. Animal bodies were deemed essential to produce, but the human bodies producing them were not deemed essential to protect. Concurrently, the zoonotic nature of COVID-19 challenged dominant narratives of human exceptionalism, reminding us of our animality and shared vulnerabilities. As the pandemic surged, the question of whose lives matter arose in social and political discourse, alongside critiques of social institutions and economic systems. This paper explores the multispecies intersections and potential kinships that were unveiled by Covid-19.

The Politics of Transgression in De Humani Corporis Fabrica

The film De Humani Corporis Fabrica has repeatedly been dubbed in the English-speaking film criticism media as a “non-fiction shocker” (Chang, 2023), a sample of “tactile cinema” (Mullen, 2023) with “ample gore on display” (Mintzer, 2022). This paper, firstly, aims to contradict these claims, as the film’s goal is not to elicit an immersive representation of the human body but a reflection on how it is instead objectified, abstracted, and interpreted by means of deconstructing the medical gaze and via a complex interplay between the viewer’s quasi-identification and alienation. To this end, it closely analyses the patterns in the camerawork, the various degrees of remediation of the medical imagery, and the relationships between denotation and connotation, highlighting the prevalence of de-dramatization strategies, which run counter to societal taboos and conventional representations of the hospital in popular culture as a sensationalized site of emergencies. As such, we argue that De Humani Corporis Fabrica is an essay film that seeks neither to “shock” viewers nor to mount a narrow institutional critique of the French sanitary system. By delving into the film’s intricate biopolitics, we outline how the various levels of transgression, the emphasis on “malfunction,” and the pervasiveness of technology are framed as symptoms of broader tensions between paternalistic modes of interaction and patient-centred approaches within the Western sanitary system at large. Finally, by interpreting the ending as a counterpoint to the objectifying gaze that the film lures us into adopting throughout, we consequently stress the film’s defiant sense of “anarchy,” as it urges us to reclaim “our” bodies, be them individual or collective.

Crip curation and the aesthetics of the undeliverable

In this article, the author argues how the conceptual curatorial work of Lucy Lippard imbued similar qualities to those that are embodied in the curatorial work of the ‘aesthetics of the undeliverable’. The aesthetics of the undeliverable is a new genre of disability curating that centers the realities of disability and access within curatorial and artistic practice, alongside exhibition design. The line that runs through both styles of curatorial practice, that is, Lippard’s work, and the aesthetics of the undeliverable, is political intent, where the behind-the-scenes labor of the curator is revealed. Specifically, in Lippard’s projects, errors, gaps, and professional time-frames were revealed, whilst the aesthetics of the undeliverable points out inequities towards disabled artists and audiences, yet insisting on time-lines that defy normative frameworks. The author examines these generative comparisons through Lippard’s ‘numbers’ exhibitions curated in the 1960s–1970s, alongside a case study of the exhibition, Undeliverable, curated by artist Carmen Papalia, which was held at Tangled Art + Disability Gallery in Toronto, followed by the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, Ontario in 2021. In doing this, she aims to show how the aesthetics of the undeliverable is a form of institutional critique within disability arts and culture that has its roots in the proponents of conceptual art of the 1960s and Lippard, to which crip curating is aligned through its oppositional handling of curatorial norms. This dovetails powerfully with a call by Disability Studies scholars to move towards crip methodology, and this article will show how crip curation and the aesthetics of the undeliverable heeds this call.

Exploring the Role of Conceptual Art for the New Museology – Conceptual Art as Method in Revisiting Objects, Their Display, and Heritage Institutions

ABSTRACT In the context of the recent involvement of contemporary art in the field of museology, my article aims to point out the revolutionary role that conceptual art played in the understanding of heritage. This article argues that conceptual art crucially advanced the critical redefinition of the nature, value, display, role, and agency of the heritage object. Due to the specific understanding of the “object” and the institutional critique discourse it established, conceptual art significantly furthered the development of new methodologies in museological practice since the beginning of the twentieth century. Although new museology gradually involved contemporary art, a theory of its specific modus operandi in this context and – as will be argued – the particular contribution of conceptual art have not been systematically pursued so far. This article will demonstrate how the involvement of conceptual, performative, and multi-disciplinary artistic practices as well as display strategies have contributed to the elaboration of innovatory, critical, de-colonial, and inclusive methods of heritage transmission.

Ideology of the Image: Wu Guanzhong's Abstract Expression, 1979–1983

This article examines the discourse of abstraction among Beijing intellectuals in response to the artist Wu Guanzhong's 吴冠中 (1919–2010) published essays on formal and abstract beauty from 1979 and 1980. By introducing Wu through a new critical lens that emphasizes his writings and institutional critique, the author addresses how abstraction was repurposed for early post‐Mao China. Where institutional elites in Beijing regarded painterly abstraction with unease, owing to its continued associations with the bourgeois‐capitalist art worlds of Paris and New York, this article shows how Wu performed an aesthetic intervention through writing, utilizing scientism and Maoist logic to filter abstraction through the still‐hegemonic language of radical materialism, which allowed abstraction to take hold as a renewed term of engagement in the early post‐Mao art world by 1983. This article is a shortened version of a chapter in the author's recently published book.

Toward a Queer and (Trans)Formative Methodology for Rhetoric of Health and Medicine: Institutional Critique

This article argues that the field of rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) needs queer and (trans)formative methodologies to support a disempowered, ignored, and devalued queer community. Building directly from Mohan J. Dutta’s (2022) work, the article 1) addresses that RHM scholarly practices attend to whiteness and neglect to amplify queer and transgender interventional and rhetorical approaches; 2) develops a methodology–institutional critique–for RHM practitioners that crosses disciplinary boundaries to showcase cistematic oppression at infrastructural, structural, institutional, and interpersonal levels; and 3) provides a personal medical story that showcases how institutions fail transgender and queer patients. Through this work, this article argues for the need for rhetorical methodological intervention in RHM research and to mobilize transgender rhetorical agency through coalitional building.

The Politics of Taking No Position: Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda

Since the 1970s, thinking about the social dimensions of artmaking has been dominated by two lines of inquiry: firstly, regarding artists’ decisions to make one kind of work versus another, and secondly, concerning the curators, critics, collectors, and viewers who together determine art’s meaning and value. Works of Institutional Critique following in this lineage argue that artworks are permeated by the social relations that predominate in their immediate context. Works’ meaning and value emerge, immanently, in relation to this ground. Yet thinking about the social dimensions of artmaking has failed to account for the way that contemporary art’s representational conditions impact artistic production. In this paper, I fill a gap in art discourse surrounding the stakes of artistic production amid what Kobena Mercer calls “inclusionism.” Work by the duo Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda, I argue, reveals that––within contemporary art’s prevailing representational paradigm––of similar importance to the position one takes, is one’s position as subject. A series of exhibitions produced by Chung and Maeda between 2009 and 2021 prove that one of the primary meanings of Institutional Critique within the field of contemporary art production is the possibility of refusing the reduction of a work to its maker’s subject position. Chung and Maeda’s work can be seen as articulating insight into the objective conditions of contemporary artistic production, distribution, and reception––specifically regarding the gallerists who invited the duo to exhibit––and thereby pointing beyond contemporary art’s representational double bind.

Voices from the Other Side: Exploring Nonhuman Agents and Their Narrative Function in the Zhuangzi

In the history of Chinese literature, the Zhuangzi authors were the first to grant a voice to diverse forms of life, among them a snake, a tree, a dead man, a divine turtle, and even the wind. What exactly is the interest of incorporating nonhuman protagonists in brief literary fictions? Was there something at stake when trying out this pioneering narrative technique, or was it just for the sake of literary innovation and entertainment? Through a detailed analysis of a set of concise narratives, this study uncovers a consistent critique of the religious institutions (chiefly divination and sacrifice), as well as the economic practices prevalent during the Warring States period. It aims to demonstrate that the Zhuangzi's comprehensive critique of the Zhou cultural order achieves its “hearability” through a recurrent use of striking dualities, including day and night, dream and wakefulness, and humans and nonhumans. A heretofore silent and passive community of living beings raises its voice and is able to challenge the well-established discourse proclaiming human sovereignty over the natural world. These voices and the themes they raise serve, among other things, as a literary strategy intended to illuminate the universality of violence and the criminal essence of human culture (wen 文).

On Collaboration

Abstract “On Collaboration” attempts to situate the withdrawal of support from the magazine Artforum (precipitated by the firing of its editor-in-chief David Velasco in October 2023) within a longer history of institutional antagonism. It compares strategies of opposition available to the avant-garde and counterculture in the 1960s (as exemplified by Fluxus's George Maciunas and the novelist Thomas Pynchon) with those that emerged in the 1970s, with particular attention paid to the machinery that sustained the appearance of the art world and, more broadly, the public sphere. Citing Vito Acconci's contributions to the exhibition ROOMS P.S. 1 (1976), it argues that much of what has been historically recognized as strategies of institutional opposition from the 1970s onward, including institutional critique and the alternative space movement, might be better understood within a framework of “institutional collaboration.”

‘Wellbeing’ and the production of disability in the university: Erasure, effacement and institutional exceptionalism

This article uses ‘wellbeing’ as deployed within UK higher education as a starting point for examining the relationship between disability and the university. We explore various strands of scholarship that seek to critique wellbeing, universities, and/or connections between disability and these institutions. Work on ‘wellbeing’ identifies the harmful logics underpinning its political appropriation, but erases disability by declining to consider it as political experience. Critiques of the university efface disability by considering disablement only insofar as it affects the non-disabled, and reify ‘intellect’ as neutral entity and sole true purview of higher education. Work on the political economy of disability exposes crucial connections between disability and capitalism, and the role of economic and political institutions in upholding them, but relies on a distinction between worker and surplus that cannot reckon with institutional complexity. Finally, scholarship that directly confronts the university as disabling institution accounts for complexity, but hinges on an ultimately utopian vision of the university as an exceptional, salvageable space, neglecting key mechanisms by which it continues to marginalise disabled people. We suggest that reaching a fuller understanding of the university as producing disability must involve moving away from this exceptionalism and toward dialogue with critiques of other institutions.

Statelessness and Solidarity: Palestinians, Dhofaris, and Saharawis in Tricontinental Media

Abstract From its beginning, the Organisation of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (ospaaal) used its print media to campaign on behalf of Palestinian nationalism, articulating the concerns of displaced Palestinians from a perspective of unrecognised and thwarted national liberation movements. This organisation, responsible for carrying out the activities of the Tricontinental group that began meeting in Havana in 1966, identified the issue of Palestinian statelessness as a key feature of ongoing colonialism. From this perspective, ospaaal developed a platform from which to articulate solidarity against ongoing imperialism, one which could be usefully extended to explain and render solidarity with other causes. We argue that ospaaal’s visual and narrative framework, extended to the anti-colonial advocacy first for Dhofar (from the late 1960s to middle of the 1970s) and later for Western Sahara (late 1970s to 1990), presented a powerful, though limited, critique of international governance institutions from the Global South. Tricontinental publications’ reporting and solidarity media, in framing statelessness as an inherent problem of an incomplete process of decolonisation, critiqued the rhetorical strategies employed by imperial powers to maintain colonial relationships through international organisations like the United Nations.

Foucault, Kant, and Antiquity

Michel Foucault’s return to classical antiquity at the end of his career coincides with a turn away from institutional critique and a return to Kant. This is no coincidence. Foucault’s Introduction to Kant’s “Anthropology” (1961) completely anticipates his approach to ancient subject formations, which reflects Kant’s theory of the liberal, self-enterprising, and enlightened subject as this is outlined in Foucault’s “What Is Enlightenment?” (1984) and elsewhere. Foucault’s final studies surface isolated, private, and autonomous subjects who are at once premodern, proto-Christian, and uncannily modern. Fashioned by ascetic and aesthetic models of self-care, they testify to “a genealogy of the modern subject.”

Research on Conservative Islam in Europe: Navigating Ethical Considerations

This contribution discusses the ethical dilemmas inherent in researching marginalized communities, particularly in contexts where security approaches predominate. Focusing on a project involving white male converts to Islam who express critiques of liberal norms and institutions, this paper explores why such research is necessary despite the risk of amplifying illiberal voices. It also addresses the methodological challenges of conducting such research, considering the safety and well-being of different actors: the researcher, their respondents, and those who may be adversely affected by the exclusivist rhetoric of an illiberal community.

Constitutive inclusions

This article challenges conventional critiques of institutions within disability studies and activism by drawing on fieldwork with a Catholic home and a Pentecostal school for people with intellectual disabilities in Uganda. Rather than stop at thinking about the institutional spaces of these Christian organizations as segregating exclusions from wider social life, this article approaches the work these institutions do in terms of inclusion – as constitutive inclusions, referring to the ways these organizations serve to underwrite not only the basic existence but also the personhood of their residents and students. In turn, such an analysis supports rethinking conventional Global North understandings of institutions as well as distinctions between total and social institutions.

The Polyphony of Migrant Archives: The Curating and Art-making of “Our Journeys, Our Stories” (2022)

The article takes the exhibition “Our Journeys, Our Stories” as an example to investigate to which extent the curatorial and art practices can produce a synergy in reconfiguring migrant archives. Focusing on the exhibition’s critical engagement with official and counter archives, I analyze how it unveils the making of a racialized Chinese migrant history and retraces migrant resistance. On this basis, I turn to two commissioned artworks by Guan Wei (b. 1957) and Lindy Lee (b. 1954) to examine their dialogic relationship with the curatorial narrative. While the artworks are based on the same document on display, the former deconstructs the racializing mechanism embedded in the White Australian archiving system and the latter revitalizes migrant resilience. I claim that Guan adds institutional critique to the exhibition and Lee uses family history to enrich the curatorial concept of micro-history. The artists and curators stimulate the polyphony of migrant archives, which challenges the monolithic historiography of Chinese migration and enables a self-reflexive paradigm in curating archives and archive art.

Learning or legitimacy? An investigation of the graduate student milestones within a chemistry doctoral program

A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) is defined as the highest achievable degree and represents the completion of a specialized mentored project. Concerningly, graduate programs are structured in ways that can lead to inequities that exclude graduate students based on race, class, gender, ability, and additional intersecting social locations. Drawing from Yuval-Davis' framework on the politics of belonging and Porter et al.'s institutional critique methodology, the goal of the qualitative study was to examine how a chemistry graduate program fosters the professional development of its students through the graduate student milestones (admissions, preliminary exams, coursework, candidacy exam, seminar, and dissertation defense). The data comprised of documents such as the 2019 graduate student handbook and information from the departmental website, along with interviews involving faculty (N = 5), staff (N = 3), and administrators (N = 2) who served as policy agents. Findings highlight how misalignment within the admissions, preliminary exam, and candidacy milestones can create boundaries for belonging. In contrast, the seminar milestone had alignment that contributed to belonging while the coursework and dissertation defense milestones had ambiguous alignment that contributed to belonging. After gathering and analyzing the data, I collaborated with a team at the university's Department of Chemistry to revise the preliminary exam and candidacy exam milestones, aiming to enhance their inclusivity. Overall, this study offers implications for structuring chemistry graduate programs and STEM programs broadly.

Review of Unsettling Matter, Gaining Ground

Tucked within the surprisingly earnest postmodern halls of the Heinz Architectural Center in the Carnegie Museum of Art, Unsettling Matter, Gaining Ground offers a visceral portrait of extractivism. Cocurators Ala Tannir and Theodossis Issaias display a variety of media that engage mourning, loss, and action in times of climate and social transition. Anchoring seven new commissions alongside seven historical artworks from the Museum’s collection, the curators build the scaffold for an institutional critique without getting mired in the details.