ABSTRACT

To more fully understand how trauma can be inflicted by institutional betrayal, in this article I suggest that we first must ask who or what is the institution. To understand this, I analyze two recent events at Johns Hopkins University (JHU), the establishment of a university private police force and funding cuts to the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Graduate Teaching Fellowships (WGS). Paradoxically, JHU claimed it was necessary to establish a private police force because of a lack of accountability of the Baltimore Police Department; however, simultaneously JHU was unaccountable to direct JHU affiliates by ignoring their explicit disapproval of a private police force. JHU imagined themselves as accountable to an ambiguous ‘us’ beyond direct JHU affiliates and dispersed its accountability, evidenced by advocating for state legislature and making mayoral campaign donations. This lack of accountability was rearticulated in discussions about WGS cuts, when JHU embraced a rhetoric of the market to substantiate their claims and evade the questions of direct JHU affiliates. These cases show how articulations of who the institution imagines itself as accountable to are dynamically mutating, yet build upon precedents that set the conditions of possibility for how trauma is produced and mediated. I conclude by suggesting that it is important to move beyond a monolithic conception of the institution, and to be attuned to how dispersions of institutional accountability create new terrains where institutional contestation take place as well as the institution's strategic rupturing of the concept of the institutional citizen.

摘要

为了更全面地理解制度背叛如何造成创伤，在本文中，我建议我们首先必须问清楚制度是谁或什么是制度。为了理解这一点，我分析了约翰霍普金斯大学 (JHU) 最近发生的两起事件，即建立大学私人警察部队和削减妇女、性别和性研究生教学奖学金 (WGS) 的资金。矛盾的是，JHU 声称由于巴尔的摩警察局缺乏问责制，有必要建立一支私人警察部队；然而，与此同时，JHU 对直接 JHU 附属机构不负责任，无视他们对私人警察部队的明确反对。JHU 想象自己对一个模棱两可的“我们”负责，而不是直接 JHU 附属机构，并分散其责任，支持州立法机构和市长竞选捐款就是明证。在关于 WGS 削减的讨论中，这种缺乏问责制得到了重新表述，当时 JHU 接受了市场的言论来证实他们的主张并回避 JHU 直接附属公司的问题。这些案例表明，机构想象自己对谁负责的表述是如何动态变化的，但建立在先例之上，这些先例为创伤如何产生和调节的可能性设定了条件。最后我建议，重要的是要超越制度的单一概念，并适应制度责任的分散如何创造制度竞争发生的新领域以及制度对制度公民概念的战略性破坏。 .