Political Theory with an Ethnographic Sensibility
- PDF / 343,568 Bytes
- 34 Pages / 442.205 x 663.307 pts Page_size
- 88 Downloads / 200 Views
Political Theory with an Ethnographic Sensibility Bernardo Zacka Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA [email protected] Brooke Ackerly Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37235, USA [email protected] Jakob Elster Norwegian Centre for Human Rights, University of Oslo, 0164 Oslo, Norway [email protected] Signy Gutnick Allen London School of Economics, London WC2A 2AE, UK [email protected] Humeira Iqtidar King’s College London, London WC2B 4BG, UK [email protected] Matthew Longo Leiden University, 2333AK Leiden, The Netherlands [email protected] Paul Sagar King’s College London, London WC2B 4BG, UK [email protected]
Contemporary Political Theory (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-020-00433-1
Political theory is a field that finds nourishment in others. From economics, history, sociology, psychology, and political science, theorists have drawn a rich repertoire of schemas to parse the social world and make sense of it. With each of these 2020 Springer Nature Limited. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory www.palgrave.com/journals
Critical Exchange
encounters, new subjects are brought into focus as others recede into the background, ushering a change not only in how questions are tackled but also in what questions are thought worth asking. This Critical Exchange is devoted to a recent strand of political theory that has turned to ethnography for inspiration and grounding. On the surface, the resulting body of work may appear heterogeneous, with scholars tackling topics as diverse as border security (Longo, 2018), the frontline provision of public services (Zacka, 2017), the death fast struggle (Bargu, 2014), the political ethics of INGOs (Rubenstein, 2015), the world of wage labor (Herzog, 2018), the dynamics of interpersonal trust (Blajer de la Garza, 2019), the taking of political responsibility (Ackerly, 2018), or the ideology of Islamist parties (Iqtidar, 2011). Underpinning this diversity, however, is a twin commitment that lends these studies coherence and a distinctive place in the current landscape of the field. All of them anchor their theoretical reflection within closely textured, ‘thick’ descriptions of the social world of the kind that might be found in social anthropology – letting phenomena breathe on the page before putting order into them. They treat these descriptions, moreover, not just as illustrating theory, or as relevant for its application in the world, but as generative of theoretical insights. In seeing political theorizing in its conceptual, normative, and critical variants as bound up with an effort to interpret the social world and our experiences in it, political theory with an ethnographic sensibility is indebted to a range of intellectual traditions including critical theory (e.g., Benjamin, 1986), feminist scholarship (e.g., Mansbridge, 1980), and postcolonial studies (e.g., Memmi, 1965). It also builds upon a recent wave of interest in ethnographic methods in political science (Yanow and Schwartz-Shea,
Data Loading...
