Interrogating the Grammars of Institutions and Injustice

Abstract

This editorial introduction to ACT 16 (3) explores institutions as sites of paradox whose mission statements (or constitutions in the case Keywords: institutional injustice, social justice, racial grammar, systemic racismYou can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it. (Marilynne Robinson, Gilead) t was one of the most difficult periods of decision making I have experienced in my life-wrestling with a decision about whether to stay at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, or to return to Toronto, where other different-butrelated opportunities had presented themselves like stars twinkling in a sky that I could touch and feel. Leaving meant walking away from a job for which I had spent years preparing, for which I felt qualified, and in which I felt a growing sense of accomplishment; returning to Toronto meant returning home-to my life partner, my adult son, to the friends I have known for so long, to my adopted country. Something about my life within the institution caused me a discomfort that I had found difficult to articulate or to reconcile with my teaching and research goals. It wasn't necessarily the bureaucratic nature of institutions-I had spent a great many years of my working life in corporations and other bureaucratic situations prior to entering academe, so I knew what to expect in that I