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The chapter discusses institutions as rich sites of affect. Institutional affect comprises three main dimensions: materialities, actors, and imaginaries. By highlighting these dimensions and their interrelations within affective arrangements, institutional affect helps to explain how institutions exert power without direct enforcement and points out pathways of institutional change, as well as why it is that some institutions shift in certain directions over others. Moreover, institutional affect accounts for how and why some institutions persist despite clear evidence of their structural violence. The chapter draws on approaches that emphasize the role of symbolism, affect, and embodiment in mediating processes of institutional change. In particular, we respond to a lack of attention in extant scholarship to how affect, embodiment, and material arrangements link up with imagination and wider social imaginaries. We draw on the examples of Gisèle Pelicot’s sexual assault trial and the authoritarian takeover unfolding within the United States to illustrate how the nexus of imaginaries, materialities, and actors factors into the resilience of institutions as well as their transformation.

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