The Reorder of Things

609 Roderick Ferguson offers a critical interrogation of the university and its role in institutionalizing and containing social movements of the ’60s and ’70s. Protest movements on college campuses became absorbed into interdisciplinary departments such as women’s studies, ethnic studies, African American studies, and Native American studies. According to Ferguson, such departments have failed to bring about the material, redistributive change sought by social movements, and have instead abstracted difference. University representation has come at the cost of more radical anticapitalist, antistate aims. Ferguson asks how we may create knowledge that is in, but not of the institution. In other words, how can knowledge created by institutional actors in institutional settings still exceed the boundaries, aims, and politics of the institution itself? How might scholarship remain critical of the pitfalls of institutionalization?