Emily A. Owens
and
Jennifer C. Nash

Institutional Feelings: Practicing Women’s Studies in 2026

We commissioned this roundtable

on the tenth anniversary of a conversation we began in
Feminist Formations under the umbrella of
“Institutional Feelings: Practicing Women’s Studies in the Corporate University.”
That moment was marked by the new stark realities of the corporate university and its formations.

If the conversation a decade ago elaborated the realities of women’s studies’ partial institutionalization and uneven growth in the US academy, the reflections in this roundtable mark a moment of overwhelming crisis.

At the same time, these pieces take for granted a set of overlapping crises that have shifted the US academy writ large, before and beside the rise of Trumpism.

This moment is decisive, which is to say, the writers in this group are called, constantly, to answer a set of urgent questions.

The pieces in this section are missives from the field in which the fundamental institutional precarity of gender and sexuality studies has been unmasked.

All of this lies on the back of a longstanding history of institutional precarity
and cathection.

In a mode that is neither filled with reassurance nor nihilism, these pieces ask what it means to continue to be committed to the practice of teaching women’s and gender studies in this moment.