Political theory, political action, and the promise of ethnography

Abstract

Scholarly attention on decolonising political theory in recent times has focused on the limits of canonical and textual approaches to the discipline. Ethnography can be a useful method for rethinking both the methods of Political Theory and reconceptualising the boundaries of theory. In the context of the upsurge of authoritarianism, populism, and the concerted attacks on liberal freedoms in both the global North and the global South today, it is more relevant than ever to think about the complex lifeworlds of political concepts. How do we conceptualise political concepts such as citizenship, democracy, religious freedom, and minority rights in a world where these ideas seem to be constantly negotiated and renegotiated in relation to the vagaries of political action? This panel brings together political theorists, anthropologists, and geographers working on political concepts in both the global North and the global South to examine what ethnography might contribute to the study of political ideas. Individual papers look at how concepts in political theory are conceptualised in moments of political practice. Some of the papers focus on issues such as the conceptual architecture of liberal citizenship categories in the global South, the enmeshment of vernacular modes of resistance with putative universal categories such as human rights, and the language of the political mobilised by protest movements. By bringing together people from various disciplinary backgrounds who adopt a grounded theoretical approach to the political, this panel will ask how we might reconceptualise what is theory, who it speaks for, and to what ends.

Title	Details
Part civic, part retail’: UK Jobcentres and the re-branding of the welfare state	View Paper Details
Hindu nationalist statecraft and the politics of citizenship in contemporary India	View Paper Details
Siting protests: minority rights, everyday state and the city in Mumbai	View Paper Details