Grounded Normative Theory (GNT): Theorising with Those Who Struggle

The experience of injustice always casts a shadow behind the theorist of justice. In growing numbers and from diverse perspectives, contemporary normative theorists have turned around to study those shadows and the experience that casts them. Normative political theorists have increasingly drawn from and engaged in systematic empirical research into the lived experience of injustice, thereby developing a theoretical methodology that is imperative to theorizing about injustice. In doing so, they have cultivated a methodology of normative theorizing that has broad implications for normative political theory and for the relationship of political theory to the other subfields of political science. We ground this work in empirical inquiry and offer a novel methodology for normative inquiry which we term ‘grounded normative theory (GNT)’. GNT is a way of bringing the politics of the contestation around the meaning of concepts into the scholarship on those concepts. In GNT we create a conversation between those who live the concepts and those who theorize about those concepts and bring insights from the exchange into our scholarship.