Decolonial Institutional Scanning,
Mediation, Precarity, and Re-existence

Orientation

A new academic year has begun, at least in the North. Syllabi are posted, rosters closed, budgets approved, and new students have been told who we are. Much of Latin America and the Southern Hemisphere will open its year in February or March, and that difference is already a small lesson: the calendar, too, is an arrangement someone made. I know of few better moments to watch an institution repeat itself.

August asked whose worlds are permitted a future. September stays with that question and follows it indoors, into the offices, budgets, and forms where a future is either made repeatable or left to thin out. I want to know through which mediations some futures become reproducible while others are rendered improbable, and this month I am asking readers to look with me.

To ask this well, I propose a decolonial institutional scan. It reads policy, process, resources, governance, technology and data, public narrative, and formation together, because none of them acts alone. Its unit of analysis is modest: the repeatable arrangement. A rule, a budget line, a credential, a classification, a workflow, a habit. These small things turn an institutional value into a durable consequence, and they rarely announce themselves. What I call anticipatory diagnosis follows the present trajectory of such arrangements. It offers a disciplined account of conditions and of the futures those conditions make likely, and it stops short of prediction. The theological stakes lie here. Communal futures can be closed before they have had time to arrive, and re-existence is the patient, practical work of keeping them open.

Institutionality as Mediation

Institutions speak in mission statements, but they act through what they repeat. By institutionality I mean this repeatable machinery through which values become consequences. The image of a machine needs qualifying, and the social sciences help me qualify it. John Meyer and Brian Rowan showed long ago that organizations adopt formal structures partly as ceremony, to secure legitimacy, and that these structures are often only loosely coupled to what people do day by day.¹ James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen add that rules do not execute themselves. They are ambiguous, someone must interpret and enforce them, and so institutions change gradually from within even as they persist.² Victor Ray presses the point I most need: in racialized organizations, the distance between formal rule and actual practice is itself patterned by race.³ The machinery, then, has hands on it. It repeats because people repeat it, and they can repeat it differently.

A commitment to access remains a sentence until it has funded language services, admissions routes, faculty capacity, decision rights, and someone charged with maintaining all of it over time. The reverse also holds, and it is the harder lesson. Inherited exclusions need no one to declare them; ordinary procedure already carries them, quietly, from one academic year to the next. Research on diversity work in the Westernized university documents this closely. Sara Ahmed, listening to diversity practitioners, found that institutional commitments often work as what she calls “non-performatives”: statements that do not bring about what they name and that can stand in for the change they announce.⁴ Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev, working from three decades of data on U.S. firms, report that mandatory training and grievance procedures often failed to increase diversity in management and could reduce it.⁵ And the decolonial sociologist, Ramón Grosfoguel, goes beneath the programs to the structure of knowledge, arguing that the canon of the Westernized university rests on an epistemic racism and sexism with a long colonial history.⁶ A former Chief of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at my institution, I do not read these critiques as arguments against inclusion; they come from people who want it and have struggled to embody it institutionally. They show how a university ecology can add an office of diversity and leave its budget, its canon, and its criteria of excellence where they were.

For this reason I count stewardship as a matter for theological inquiry and not only for administrators. Budgets, hiring, accreditation, property, workload, curriculum, and data regimes help determine who can remain, speak, learn, and lead. Where a community places its money, its time, and its signatures, it confesses what it believes about whose life should continue.

Critical Instruments and Their Institutional Sites

The thinkers I bring to this scan earned their concepts in particular places, and I want to keep them there. Michel Foucault did not infer discipline from abstract power. In Discipline and Punish he follows timetables, spatial partitioning, observation, normalizing judgment, and the examination through prisons, schools, barracks, workshops, and hospitals. These practices train bodies for institutional purposes and, in the same motion, produce comparable records of individual performance. The hospital examination is a telling case: care is joined to a documentary apparatus that renders patients knowable and comparable.⁷ I take from him a method before a theory. Read the schedules, the files, the rankings, the supervisory routines. An institution’s stated mission is testimony, and testimony has to be checked against the record.

Aníbal Quijano widens the frame from the disciplinary institution to the colonial world that housed it. He locates coloniality in the linked institutions of conquest, racial classification, labor control, and Eurocentric knowledge.⁸ María Lugones will not let that classification rest. The same order imposes a colonial/modern gender system, so gender cannot be added to race afterward as a separate variable.⁹ Achille Mbembe goes to the far edge of sovereignty, to the plantation, the colony, and the occupation, where political and military arrangements distribute exposure to death.¹⁰ Each of them names a different mechanism at a different scale, and I think we honor them by keeping the differences. Their work does not license us to call every inequity “necropolitics.” It asks something more exacting: which specific decision allocates protection, vulnerability, voice, or disposability?

Boaventura de Sousa Santos brings the question home to those of us who work in universities. He names the Western university as a particularly consequential site. Its curricular canons, its standards of valid evidence, and its professional credentials can reproduce “abyssal” exclusions whenever knowledges born outside the dominant epistemic institutions are treated as nonexistent or merely local.¹¹ His proposal for cognitive justice has a practical edge I value: it opens a university’s rules for admissions, research, publication, and community partnership to examination.¹² Exposure, though, is only half the work. Escobar’s account of autonomous design carries the analysis toward the communities affected, who must be able to shape the arrangements that sustain their worlds.¹³

Seven Lenses for the Scan

Seven lenses organize the scan. I state them as questions, since a question can be carried into a room where a verdict would not be welcome. Beside each I have set something the opening weeks of a term place within reach.

1. Policy: Which rules distribute access, obligation, risk, and possibility? Begin with the student handbook or the policies page of a syllabus.
2. Process: Which repeated sequences convert promises into outcomes? Follow one registration, financial aid, or advising sequence from start to finish.
3. Capital and resources: Where do money, property, labor, time, and protection go? Read one budget line, or the terms of one scholarship.
4. Governance: Who can decide, interpret, revise, and refuse? Look at a committee roster and ask who is absent from it.
5. Technology and data: How are persons classified, predicted, automated, or made legible? Open the learning platform or the enrollment dashboard and note what it counts.
6. Narrative, language, and marketing: Which future is publicly imagined, which language originates such a future, and whose presence validates it? Listen again to the convocation address, or reread the welcome page.
7. Formation: Which habits and subjects must be reproduced for the institution to continue? Attend to the first class, the first chapel, the first faculty meeting.

I do not offer these lenses as a checklist for labeling institutions. They form a protocol with three movements: trace the mechanism, compare the stated commitment with the observed allocation, and ask those affected to test the interpretation. The third movement is the easiest to skip.

Theological Education as a Test Site

Let me begin with the house I know best, so that readers can see the scan attempted before they try it themselves. A seminary may profess intercultural and global formation while its tuition, language policy, hiring, scholarship design, curriculum, and governing authority leave that profession fragile. I tried to sharpen this test in “The Latino/a/x Space in the North American Seminary: Forming In-Between.” There I read the North American seminary’s educational business model through Latino/a/x underrepresentation, white normativity, and the distance between multicultural rhetoric and the places where money and power reside. I proposed shared authority, epistemic plurality, and a mutual formation in which faculty also learn from students and communities.¹⁴ The ATS figures in that article are evidence for the years I cited. They are no substitute for current enrollment data, and I should hold my own work to the standard I am asking of others. A September scan therefore asks who controls budgets and programs now, how bilingual scholarship is rewarded, what pastoral knowledge counts as research, and whether affected communities can revise the institution’s criteria of success.

Precarity as Institutional Design and Research Site

The seminary is one house on a long street, and the same machinery works beyond it at a harsher scale. Precarity names exposure to unstable work, residence, housing, health, education, and political recognition. It falls unevenly, and often it is produced at a desk. Recent scholarship lets us watch the mechanism in very different places. In Cape Town, Nyamnjoh, Hall, and Cirolia show how permits and asylum processes shape the working practices of Congolese women, while prayer, social ties, and improvisation carry them through.¹⁵ I read their account as a caution addressed to people like me, who are quick to celebrate resilience. That these women endure is no proof that administrative insecurity is harmless. The scale exceeds any single city. The ILO reports that the number of informal workers reached two billion in 2023, which makes informality a global labor condition and not a small residual sector. The 2024 global multidimensional poverty study found that nearly 40 percent of the 1.1 billion people in acute multidimensional poverty lived in countries exposed to violent conflict.¹⁶ These figures describe different populations. They cannot be combined into a single measure of precarity, and I set them side by side only to show how wide the ground is.

Precarity as a Patterned Design

None of this divides neatly into North and South. Cases from the Global North reveal internal colonial arrangements. In Puerto Rico, Zambrana traces how debt governance and austerity reorganize public life within a continuing colonial relationship. The contributors to Colonial Racial Capitalism follow the administrative afterlives of dispossession into policing, municipal software, and public institutions in North America.¹⁷ Together these studies support a claim about patterned design: fiscal rules, property regimes, and classifications can move risk toward communities with less power while insulating creditors, owners, or decision makers. They do not establish that every adverse outcome is intended. The scan asks a more patient question, namely, how consequences are produced and who holds the power to reverse them.

Precarity as Living in the Conditional Tense

The second Trump administration offers a current United States instance of security made contingent on administration. In February 2025, DHS published notice terminating the 2023 Temporary Protected Status designation for Venezuela. Months of litigation followed, with protection suspended and restored by turns, until a Supreme Court order of October 3, 2025 allowed the termination to take effect while the case continued. The 2021 designation was terminated that November.¹⁸ What grips my attention is the mechanism: the power to alter the duration and conditions of lawful presence by notice. For a household or an employer, such a notice changes the horizon of work, housing, and schooling long before anyone is removed. People learn to live in the conditional tense. I take this as evidence of a design of differential security. The record alone does not establish every downstream economic or health effect, and I will not claim that it does. The same scan should then turn and ask which institutions, in a season of retrenchment, receive exemptions, stable funding, or procedural protection.

Precarity as the Normalization of Insecurity

Precarity has political consequences as well, though I resist reducing polarization to insecurity alone. Material strain interacts with racialized narratives, partisan organization, media systems, and institutional distrust. An adequate inquiry compares these mediations and declines to read a population’s politics off its economic condition. The decolonial question stays concrete. Whose insecurity is normalized as flexibility? Whose is framed as threat? And whose security is treated as an entitlement no one thinks to question?

Anticipatory Diagnosis and AI

Institutions now try to read their own futures, and increasingly they ask machines and algorithms to help. Longitudinal records of enrollment, finance, curriculum, staffing, and demographics can indeed reveal dependence and emerging contraction. Yet a predictive system learns from the past it is given, and it can hand historically unequal access back to us as an apparently neutral forecast. The scan should therefore document data provenance, missing populations, target definitions, decision thresholds, appeal routes, and the costs of error. It should also set machine-generated classifications beside the accounts of the people classified. Anticipation is responsible only when the institutional choices behind a forecast remain open to contest. What Michael Kwet calls digital colonialism complicates the matter further, since the software, infrastructure, and data on which many institutions depend are owned and governed elsewhere.¹⁹

A Scan for the First Weeks (Fall 2026)

Here is what I ask of readers as this academic year opens. Choose one arrangement in the institution you know: a seminary, a congregation, a school, an agency, a denominational office. Keep it small. A scholarship form will teach more than a strategic plan. Read it through a single lens during the first weeks of the term, and write down what it does, which may differ from what it says. Then take your reading to one person who lives under that arrangement and ask whether it is true. Let that person correct you.

Three cautions belong to the exercise. Scan your own house before your neighbor’s. Describe a mechanism before you name a motive. And protect those who speak with you, since the people most exposed to an arrangement often have the least security in criticizing it.

Share with us what you find through Substack (https://fromtheborders.substack.com/) or From the Borders (www.garcia-johnson.com). A paragraph is enough: the arrangement, the lens, what you saw, and what the person affected said back. Readers in places where the year opens in February or March may keep the exercise until then, or tell us what the middle of a year reveals that its beginning hides. With permission, and without names where names would cost someone, these scans will inform the companion pastoral letter and the briefs that follow.

Re-existence as Redesign

Critique that ends in exposure leaves people where it found them. Re-existence asks which arrangements make life reproducible without reinstalling the hierarchy under criticism. Community networks of care, mutual aid, worship, grassroots learning, and collective memory are sources of institutional knowledge; they are more than compensations for institutional failure. The question is how to transfer resources and authority so that these practices can endure without demanding permanent heroic survival. No community should need heroism to reach the end of the month. Academic analysis can trace mechanisms. Communities must be able to contest its categories and to name the capacities it has missed.

So the brief returns, with three questions, to the communities it describes.

• What forms of life are you already sustaining that our institutional categories fail to recognize?
• Which rules, funds, technologies, and decisions strengthen or erode those practices?
• If one arrangement could be redesigned, what would you change, and what must be preserved?

The companion pastoral letter (in Spanish and English) begins from those lived practices and from whatever readers send back. It should be allowed to revise this research framework itself.

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