Writing Politics. Power and poetics in political science

As academics, we write: writing is central to academic practice, and the classic academic product is a written text. But we are writing under pressure. Our writing is constrained by the requirements and genre of the academic monograph and the peer-reviewed journal article; it may face the barriers of natural language in an internationalising profession, while we struggle, too, with ever more complex and specific scientific infra-languages. At the same time, we are told to write in ways that both push the boundaries of our professional field and are accessible to non-expert readers. These struggles are heightened in the fields of politics, political science and International Relations, where choices of words and formulations are not mere questions of style but related to substantial struggles of power, hierarchy and representation. This workshop takes inspiration from James Clifford and George Marcus's edited volume Writing Culture (University of California Press, 1986), and its title from Michael Shapiro's recent monograph Writing Politics (Routledge, 2021). Writing Culture raised essentially political questions which political science has still barely acknowledged, which were principally about writing and the right to represent: who might write about whom and on what terms? And to the extent that politics is done in writing - in the world (in parliamentary papers, in briefs, communiques and reports as well as on posters and placards) as well as in research and teaching, too - what politics does our writing do? These questions have been taken up in other disciplines - including anthropology, STS and management studies - often in the context of ethnographic inquiry, which is currently experiencing a revival in political science. Taking up John von Maanen's (2011, Chicago University Press) identification and categorisation of 'ethnographic tales', for example, how might we craft 'political tales'? What challenges does politics face in constructing narratives and writing stories which 'take us there'? What relations between writer, subject and reader do we seek to develop? Can we tell stories in studying politics? Are we bound by academic precept always to explain, or might we, as George Lukacs (1936) once put it, also narrate? This workshop takes on these questions to explore how the inscription of the world influences the way we understand, theorise, and relate to it. This is in line with emerging debates in political science on the role of style and methods, and power and poetics in writing. We are led by two key questions: 1. What do we know about the dominant forms of writing politics? For example, what tensions exist between political science and other forms of political communication and how might they be overcome? 2. How and why might we write politics differently? Are we (with Spivak) to represent the unrepresented, or to theorise the tacit, unsaid and unwritten (with Bourdieu)? Must we choose between writing for the academy and writing for the reader? Might we disrupt institutional and political dynamics by writing (them) differently?