Embodied Institutions and Epistemic Exclusions: Affect in the Academy

Abstract

This paper explores the intersection between affect, emotion, social imaginaries, and institutions through the lens of epistemic power in the academy. It argues that attending to this intersection is critical for a fuller understanding of how affective and emotional dynamics can assist to entrench, but also disrupt, asymmetries of epistemic privilege that cut across lines of race, sex, and other markers of social difference. As part of this discussion the paper reflects on the possibility of intervening in dominant social imaginaries that become sedimented in the routine operations of the modern university, and which produce affective ecologies that sustain epistemic exclusions within academic institutions.