Handbook

The unit will combine conceptualizations of institutions from the humanities and social sciences with critical case study analysis to develop ethical considerations about institutional life. Social scientific theorizations of institutions have traditionally examined the ways in which social bodies gain structure and meaning through institutional regulations, policies, laws and cultural norms. It is increasingly understood, however, that institutions are sites and processes capable of not only regulating society but of actively producing the social by fostering diverse forms of ‘institutional subjectivity’ and therefore shaping how people ‘instinctively’ behave and conduct themselves.

Institutions thus represent important sites for theorizing ethics and for posing ethical questions targeting their influence over societies and the forms of individual and collective socialization they produce. As will be examined in the unit, exploring the ethics of institutions is pertinent both because ethics provides a framework for evaluating social practices as they arise through institutional processes, but also because the formalization of ethical rules and regulations in itself constitutes a form of institution.

The unit integrates scholarly texts with examples of institutions across a range of domains, histories, and geographies. Structurally in the course, these materials amount to a series of paired lectures, the first of which introduces theoretical work on the core concepts of institution, subjectivity and ethics, and the second of which presents a case study through which those ideas are put into practice. As part of each pairing, the course content and discussions aim at encouraging critical appraisals of the theories and empirical spaces studied as well as informed speculation about emerging institutional trends. The course will develop skills in critical thinking, and in synthesizing case study data with theoretical research. At the conclusion of the course, students will be able to utilize these diverse forms of knowledge to evaluate the ethical importance of institutions around us in the contemporary world.