Short Abstract

Close encounters are deeply embedded in the making of institutions and policies. In this panel, we examine how affect and bodily contact animate institutions through the notion of touch: How do institutions touch, and what touches them?

Long Abstract

Affective attachments and close encounters are deeply embedded in the making of institutions and policies. This panel asks what emerges in the zones of contact between bodies and institutions: How are these contact zones enacted, regulated, and transformed, and how do they become transformative themselves? How do institutions touch, and what touches them?

In care facilities, shelters, community projects, welfare and public offices, encounters between professionals and clients, doctors and patients, state agents and recipients, bodies and technologies are highly choreographed and traversed by hierarchical dispositions. Through routines, protocols, and policies, institutions organize close contacts and affective relations: touching bodies, disclosing vulnerabilities, establishing trust and hope, producing dependency, witnessing pain, administering or refusing care.

The panel approaches touch as both bodily contact and affective relation: to touch also means to be touched, moved, or affected. This double movement opens up questions about how institutions regulate close contact while themselves being sustained, unsettled, or transformed through the affective and bodily encounters they host. The panel asks:

How do institutions enable, regulate, or prohibit different forms of touch and proximity?

How do actors perform touching and being touched as part of everyday institutional practice?

What affects and emotions - boredom, frustration, dis/comfort, pleasure - are generated through institutional routines and body regulation?

How are institutions and policies themselves touched in the process of their own making and how might other forms of touching, relating or distancing transform these institutional arrangements?

How do institutions perpetuate, refuse, remember or rework historically violent forms of touch?