DOI: 10.1177/01614681261500336 ISSN: 0161-4681

“. . .and those boys safe and warm in their beds.”: Institutional Recursion in Schooling and the Reproduction of Harm: Reading The Holdovers as Educational Theory

Jennifer Lee O’Donnell
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Context:

Scholarship on transgenerational trauma has examined how suffering persists through familial, collective, historical, colonial, and embodied forms of transmission. Critical scholarship on schooling has likewise demonstrated that educational institutions can produce patterned forms of vulnerability and harm rather than simply receive traumatized students from elsewhere. Less attention has been given to the temporal processes through which institutions reproduce harm across successive generations of occupants who may share no genealogy, community, memory, or direct relationship. This essay isolates that institutional process while distinguishing it from established accounts of transgenerational trauma.

Focus of Study:

This essay develops two concepts for theorizing how institutional harm persists across time. Institutional recurrence names the cycling of different people through durable positions of vulnerability, while institutional recursion describes the return of subjects shaped by those positions into roles of authority, where adaptations formed under earlier exposure can enter new institutional relationships. Reading Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers as educational theory, the essay examines how institutional roles and routine practices distribute protection unevenly and shape defensive strategies for managing vulnerability. It further considers what these processes mean for trauma-informed pedagogies that locate both trauma and repair primarily within individuals and interpersonal relationships.

Research Design:

This study is a theoretical inquiry conducted through close reading of The Holdovers , situated within traditions of educational theorizing through popular culture rather than empirical research on schools. The film is treated as a thinking device that condenses institutional processes ordinarily dispersed across longer periods of educational life. The analysis moves between film scenes, screenplay, and scholarship on trauma, institutional harm, teacher formation, and trauma-informed pedagogy. Attention is given to Barton Academy’s institutional roles, administrative practices, and teacher–student relationships as sites through which vulnerability, protection, and defensive adaptation are organized across time.

Conclusions:

The analysis suggests that institutional harm can persist not only through transmission between people or communities but also through durable positions that repeatedly expose successive occupants to similar vulnerabilities. When people formed within those positions later enter roles of authority, strategies developed under earlier institutional exposure may reappear as practices of withdrawal, control, recognition, or care. Institutional recurrence and recursion therefore shift attention from damaged individuals toward the roles and arrangements through which vulnerability is repeatedly produced. For trauma-informed pedagogy, this framework suggests that relational care remains necessary but cannot by itself transform institutions whose procedures continue to reproduce unequal exposure and make care costly or precarious.

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