Instituting: Toward the Disalienation of Social Life

Instituting explores the history and afterlives of 20th century experiments in collective life. It examines attempts to redefine institutions as social and critical formations, and recognizes institutional psychotherapy – including anti-colonial social therapy, institutional pedagogy, and institutional analysis – as an experimental practice that seeks to transform social relations and counter their conditions of alienation. Emerging from the context of antifascist resistance, institutional psychotherapy was a crucial nexus of twentieth-century thought, linking figures including Frantz Fanon, Félix Guattari, François Tosquelles, Anne Querrien, Ginette Michaud, Fernand Deligny, and Michel Foucault. This series revisits those historical constellations, their legacies and contemporary applications, tracing how varied practices, spanning the clinical, the political, and the aesthetic, converge in projects such as schizoanalysis, the work of the La Borde clinic, and broader movements of psychiatric and social reform. Beyond the clinic, the series foregrounds the interdisciplinary reach of these practices across philosophy, sociology, architecture, urban studies, media theory, and the arts. Particular attention is given to the role of media, environments, and material dispositifs – such as maps, diagrams, films, and the physical institutions themselves —in reshaping social relations. The series situates these practices within a broader field of disalienation and decolonial struggle, demonstrating the ways in which institutional analysis intersects with questions of empire, migration, and racialized violence. Bringing together translations, critical editions, and original research, the series highlights the continued relevance of these traditions in present-day emancipatory practices, including those emerging across the Global South and in diasporic contexts, where the legacies of Fanon, Guattari, and others are reworked in response to ongoing forms of dispossession and resistance.