Research events
from November 7, 2025 to November 8, 2025
Research events
Published on September 23, 2025– Updated on September 23, 2025
Caring, educating, supporting today: Dynamics of institutionalization and deinstitutionalization
Location: CY Cergy Paris Université, Site de Gennevilliers
International seminar coordinated by Bruno Robbes from EMA research center.
In all the professions involved in linking people together (in healthcare institutions, in teaching and training establishments, in the welfare and medico-social sectors) a process of unlinking is at work everywhere today. They are an obstacle to the tasks for which these organisations were created and hinder the essential and endless task of humanising mankind. Neoliberal deinstitutionalisation and the resurgence of nationalism are attacking the possibility of creating links.
However, the people who continue to work in accordance with the ways opened up by the pioneers of institutional psychotherapy and pedagogy are continuing their actions and their reflections, with all the changes and developments that their working conditions or the changes in their relationship with the people they serve. Making visible these institutionalising practices is now a social priority. Because we know that institutions run through and structure human beings, we have observed that the processes of institutionalisation, deinstitutionalisation and re-institutionalisation at work in all the professions involved in linking people together are not merely defensive – quite the opposite. There are many examples to show that, over the long term, they are more robust than the neoliberal deinstitutionalisation that has been predicted, and are inspiring for our times, “as a political-therapeutic process”. It’s up to us to make them visible where they have become invisible or naturalised.
In all the professions involved in linking people together (in healthcare institutions, in teaching and training establishments, in the welfare and medico-social sectors) a process of unlinking is at work everywhere today. They are an obstacle to the tasks for which these organisations were created and hinder the essential and endless task of humanising mankind. Neoliberal deinstitutionalisation and the resurgence of nationalism are attacking the possibility of creating links.
However, the people who continue to work in accordance with the ways opened up by the pioneers of institutional psychotherapy and pedagogy are continuing their actions and their reflections, with all the changes and developments that their working conditions or the changes in their relationship with the people they serve. Making visible these institutionalising practices is now a social priority. Because we know that institutions run through and structure human beings, we have observed that the processes of institutionalisation, deinstitutionalisation and re-institutionalisation at work in all the professions involved in linking people together are not merely defensive – quite the opposite. There are many examples to show that, over the long term, they are more robust than the neoliberal deinstitutionalisation that has been predicted, and are inspiring for our times, “as a political-therapeutic process”. It’s up to us to make them visible where they have become invisible or naturalised.
