Starting somewhere different: methodological cosmopolitanism and the study of world politics

In this article, I contribute to the debate on Ulrich Beck's idea of ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’ from a political science perspective. How fruitful is Beck's idea for the study of world politics? How can a political science perspective turn ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’ into a more transdisciplinary subject of debate? Guided by these questions, I speak to two audiences. First, I offer political scientists a distinct strategy for empirical ‘cosmopolitan political science’ research. At the heart of this strategy is a novel object of research, the ‘cosmopolitan outlook’, understood as a discourse that breaks with the ‘national outlook’ to open possibilities for a world beyond ‘reflexive modernization’. With that, I shift the perspective from structure to discourse and broaden the normative grounds on which to assess cosmopolitan reality. Rather than just considering the emergence of normative cosmopolitan ideals, I build into cosmopolitan research the normative, empirical question of whether we see an emergence of a world beyond reflexive modernization. Second, I address scholars outside the field of political science who are interested in methodological cosmopolitanism by offering the ‘cosmopolitan outlook’ as a novel object of study that could also be explored from other disciplinary perspectives and by proposing they put the question of the purpose of methodological cosmopolitanism centre stage. This question can, I argue, constitute grounds for substantial debates on methodological cosmopolitanism not already precluded through disciplinary premises and concerns. Contributing to such a transdisciplinary debate, I distinguish between the long‐term and immediate purpose of methodological cosmopolitanism, the former being about the development of a cosmopolitan language and grammar and the latter about empirical explorations of the reality of the ‘cosmopolitan outlook’, eventually and in a collective and transdisciplinary endeavour building up to contribute to the former.     

Gendering Global Governance

In this article I map out the major debates on global governance and the feminist critiques of the mainstream interventions in these debates. I argue that the shift from government to governance is a response to the needs of a gendered global capitalist economy and is shaped by struggles, both discursive and material, against the unfolding consequences of globalization. I suggest feminist interrogations of the concept, processes, practices and mechanisms of governance and the insights that develop from them should be centrally incorporated into critical revisionist and radical discourses of and against the concept of global governance. However, I also examine the challenges that the concept of global governance poses for feminist political practice, which are both of scholarship and of activism as feminists struggle to address the possibilities and politics of alternatives to the current regimes of governance. I conclude by suggesting that feminist political practice needs to focus on the politics of redistribution in the context of global governance.     

What’s Wrong with Us? Sexual Misconduct and the Discipline of Political Science

ABSTRACT

Sexual misconduct matters not only when it is perpetuated by political actors in political institutions. It matters wherever it happens and whomever it happens to, because it is, at its base, political. Politics is fundamentally about power: who gets what, when, and how. As political scientists it should be at the heart of what we study, but it isn’t. Our discipline creates artificial (and somewhat arbitrary) boundaries about which studies of politics count as meaningful research and which do not. We discourage research that explores more expansive notions of how politics is practiced in broader society. As academics we have the luxury of speaking out. I argue here that political scientists ought to embrace an expansive definition of politics to address the real questions of power, its abuse in our society and in our profession.     

Theorizing Globalization

I sketch aspects of a critical theory of globalization that will discuss the fundamental transformations in the world economy, politics, and culture in a dialectical framework that distinguishes between progressive and emancipatory features and oppressive and negative attributes. This requires articulations of the contradictions and ambiguities of globalization and the ways that globalization both is imposed from above and yet can be contested and reconfigured from below. I argue that the key to understanding globalization is theorizing it as at once a product of technological revolution and the global restructuring of capitalism in which economic, technological, political, and cultural features are intertwined. From this perspective, one should avoid both technological and economic determinism and all one–sided optics of globalization in favor of a view that theorizes globalization as a highly complex, contradictory, and thus ambiguous set of institutions and social relations, as well as one involving flows of goods, services, ideas, technologies, cultural forms, and people.     

Polarized Scientists? Exploring Political Differences about Religion and Science among U.S. Biologists and Physicists1

From the Texas textbook debate to the March for Science, visible displays of activism illuminate how deeply politicized the science‐religion interface has become. However, little is known about the extent to which scientists’ attitudes about science and religion are politicized. Using original survey data from 1,989 U.S. academic biologists and physicists, we examine the degree to which political views shape how scientists perceive the relationship between religion and science, religious authority, their personal religious identity, and views on dominant scientific theories. Findings suggest that, indeed, the science‐religion interface holds political meaning for scientists, but in different ways across the political spectrum. Specifically, for politically liberal scientists, atheism and the conflict narrative are particularly politicized belief structures, while politically conservative scientists emphasize religious identity to distinguish themselves from political liberals. Findings point to the critical role of politics in shaping scientists’ attitudes and identities, which may have implications for the scientific enterprise, both at the lab bench and in the political sphere.     

Developments in gender and U.S. politics: A call for intersectionality

Since “women and politics” scholarship emerged in the 1970s, social, institutional, and theoretical developments have shaped the trajectory of U.S. scholarship in this field. First, the presence of women in formal politics has increased, albeit unevenly across parties and minority groups over time. Simultaneously, the capacity to study “political women” has become supported through institutional mechanisms such as academic journals and communities of practice. Moreover, gender as a critical focus of analysis has been developed and refined. In the literature on women and politics, the shift from studying sex differences to interrogating gendered political institutions is especially salient. This institutional focus, along with recent intersectional studies of gender and politics, increases opportunities for cross‐pollination of sociological and political science perspectives. In this review, I provide a brief history of the U.S. scholarship on gender and politics and map these relevant social, institutional, and theoretical advances. I highlight the value of recent intersectional contributions in this field and make the case for bringing partisanship—an increasingly salient political identity and structure—into intersectional approaches to gender and politics.     

Cosmopolitics: towards a new articulation of politics,science and critique

This paper explores how Ulrich Beck's world‐risk‐society theory (WRST) and Bruno Latour's Actor‐Network Theory (ANT) can be combined to advance a theory of cosmopolitics. On the one hand, WRST helps to examine ‘cosmopolitan politics’, how actors try to inject cosmopolitanism into existing political practices and institutions anchored in the logic of nationalism. On the other hand, ANT sheds light on ‘cosmological politics’, how scientists participate in the construction of reality as a reference point for political struggles. By combining the WRST and ANT perspectives, it becomes possible to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of cosmopolitics that takes into account both political and ontological dimensions. The proposed synthesis of WRST and ANT also calls for a renewal of critical theory by making social scientists aware of their performative involvement in cosmopolitics. This renewal prompts social scientists to explore how they can pragmatically support certain ideals of cosmopolitics through continuous dialogues with their objects of study, actors who inhabit different nations and different cosmoses.     

Who Wants a Deliberative Public Sphere?1

Democratic theorists and social scientists suggest that a deliberative public sphere would be good for democracy by maximizing emancipatory possibilities and providing broad legitimacy to political decision making. But do ordinary Americans actually want a deliberative public sphere? I examine this question in the context of four contentious “religion and science” debates. Through a multidimensional evaluation exercise with 62 ordinary respondents, I find that evaluation of public representatives in these debates tends to favor open‐mindedness and ongoing debate. Further, respondents explicitly discount elected representatives who participate in public debate precisely because they are seen as violating deliberative norms through their affiliation with electoral politics. Respondents want a deliberative public sphere. However, this desire reflects an understanding of the public sphere and institutional politics as disconnected arenas with incompatible rules and objectives, raising multiple questions for democratic theory and for political sociology.     

Science and the Mass Media –‘Medialization’ as a New Perspective on an Intricate Relationship

This survey article discusses a recently proposed perspective on the science–media interface the concept of medialization. The medialization approach assumes that there is mutual resonance between science and the mass media. Medialization research systematically investigates structural transformation in science: What are the implications of high media attention for science funding, for research agendas, for universities and the professional self‐understanding of scientists? And how do these developments relate to the production of scientific knowledge? For detailed empirical studies of these processes, the medialization approach separates the role of mass media, but its grounding in general social theory contextualises this research with social science studies on sciences relation to other spheres such as politics and the economy.     

Where are we when we litigiously judge? Politics and aesthetics in Hannah Arendt and Jacques Rancière

ABSTRACT

In contrast to the scenario depicted by Carl Schmitt, contemporary theory has contradicted the “thesis of differentiation” between aesthetics and “the political.” Critical theorists claimed aesthetic analysis’ relevance for grasping aspects of the political realm. And political thought took an “aesthetic turn.” Hannah Arendt and Jacques Rancière have been influential figures in this turn. Their thought offers a clear response to the challenges to the aesthetico-political Schmitt poses. To approach Arendt and Rancière’s responses, this essay proceeds in three parts. The first section analyses Arendt’s reading of the connection between aesthetics and politics. Focusing on a major shift in her perspective on judgement, I argue that her account is influenced by the ungrounded character of politics. The second section thematises the role that the relationship of aesthetics and politics has in Rancière’s work. I claim that his writings might be read as a challenge to Arendt’s attempt to “stabilise” politics by distinguishing it from the social question. Finally, the third section explicitly contrasts Arendt and Rancière’s accounts of the aesthetic-political. I conclude by arguing that their projects are crucial resources for formulating a critical theory that should resist the exceptionalist temptation to conceive “the political” as an incontestable nature.     

Homonationalism

This article tracks Jasbir Puar's term “homonationalism” as its meaning has transformed in her scholarly work as well that of Maya Mikdashi. I argue that homonationalism has evolved from its original formulation as, in part, a critique of politics, into, in its current guise, a diagnostic of international political relations. Although this transition offers insight into the international scene, I argue that homonationalism also loses its distinctiveness as a political formation in its own right as well as its critical capacity in the process. In particular, I argue that homonationalism becomes incapable of critically evaluating activist strategies, practices and discourses of political resistance.     

Globalizations and the Transformation of Environmental Activism: Turkey since the 1980s

Social scientists have developed two main arguments regarding the impacts of globalization on environmental activism and politics. Environmental activism is thought to be associated with instances of local resistance to transnational corporations, and also with a diffusion of environmentalist ideas, practices, and regulations from global core to periphery. Alternatively, this paper argues that by eroding states' sovereignty and supporting ethnic and religious minority groups within and across nations, globalization processes have fused environmental politics with ethnic and religious identity politics worldwide. The environmentalist discourses and activities of Islamist intellectuals and Alevis (a large religious minority) in Turkey since the 1980s illustrate the limited applicability of center–periphery models of globalization, and the complexity of globalizations' impacts on environmental activism and politics.     

Primitive Globalization? State and Locale in Neoliberal Global Engagement

Drawing widely from sociology, political science, and urban studies, this article introduces the term 'primitive globalization' in order to address issues of state and governance for localities that globalize within a national context. Suggested by the discussion of primitive accumulation in Marx's Capital , this conceptual frame highlights the ways in which states neither circumvented by globalization nor resistant to it may facilitate neoliberal globalization by 'separating' or disembedding social actors from conditions that otherwise impede short-term economic activity. This conception, which is considered primarily in relation to the United States, positions the state as both facilitator and victim of globalization, draws attention to state fragmentation and national politics, and places the role of the national state in the local state at the center of unstable linkages. It is suggested that under these conditions the national/local state may be caught between the roles of government and governance; for this reason, as well as others, contemporary globalization remains transitional.     

Clarification? Yes! Standarization? No. Or: What Kind of Cooperation for the Sociology of Culture?

Christian Smith’s paper “The Incoherence of ‘Culture’ in American Sociology” is a valuable provocation that can prompt us to reflect on the role of concepts and on the role of agreement on the definition of concepts in scientific research. In this comment paper, I raise questions about Smith’s empirical expectation that sociologists should agree on a concept of culture based on debates in the sociology of science. I also suggest that in terms of the future agenda for the sociology of culture, we should distinguish between dialogue and clarification on the one hand, which I agree is needed, and standardization on the other hand, which seems incompatible with open-minded empirical research. Rather than work on agreement on what culture is, we might work on clarifying relevant distinctions among dimensions of culture.     

The Secret Downing Street Memo,the One Percent Doctrine,and the Politics of Truth: A Performance Text

Presented to the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction in Montreal, Canada, on August 7, 2006, this performance text is a critique of the Bush administration and its reliance on science, or evidence‐based models of inquiry (SBR). SBR raises issues concerning the politics of truth and evidence. These issues intersect with the ways in which a given political regime fixes facts to fit ideology. Three versions of SBR are discussed. A model of science as disruptive cultural practice is outlined. I locate the interactionist project in the discourses surrounding the global war on terror and the war in Iraq. I conclude by calling for a merger of critical pedagogy with a prophetic, feminist postpragmatism.     

Transcending the Nation-State?: The European Commission and the (Re)-Discovery of Europe

Abstract: This article examines the process of European integration from a cultural perspective. Taking up questions posed by social scientists and European Community (EC) officials concerning the possibility of transcending nation-state and nationalism in Europe, it explores the European Commission's attempts to do this, particularly through the EC's campaigns and initiatives for forging a sense of European identity and culture at the level of popular consciousness. Following Hobsbawn and Ranger, I argue that the history of EC cultural politics provides an interesting case study of invented traditions and manufactured heritage. The political implications and problems of using culture as a vehicle for nation-building at a pan-European level are analysed. The article concludes with a critical appraisal of the concept of European identity and questions whether the EC's project for constructing a post-nationalist political order in Europe is feasible or politically desirable.     

Aestheticisation of Politics: From Fascism to Radical Democracy

The “aestheticisation of politics”, a term coined by Walter Benjamin, refers to a critique of various modes of politics considered to be irrational in leftist, critical theory. The critique ties aestheticised politics to fascism and capitalism, thereby precluding the conceptual possibility of a radical democratic aesthetic politics. This paper challenges that position first by working through Wolfgang Welsch’s semantic clarification of the term “aesthetics”, then by deriving different senses of “aestheticised politics” from the range of meanings given by Welsch. A typology of aestheticised politics, from fascist to communist, depicts the conceptual possibility of a radical democratic political aesthetics.     

Flawed Policy,Failed Politics? Challenging the Sexual Politics of Managing Diversity in Engineering Organizations

In Australia, as in most other developed countries, women constitute less than 10 per cent of engineers and they are leaving the profession faster than men. Engineering organizations have taken up managing diversity as a key policy to improve the recruitment and retention rates of women engineers. This article contributes to the developing literature of critical approaches to diversity by drawing on data from three large engineering companies to argue that this policy fails to challenge the prevailing sexual politics in engineering. We propose the concept of ‘sexual politics’ in order to stress that gender is relational, contested and always political. In failing to engage with the sexual politics in engineering organizations, managing diversity obscures the systematic nature of women's disadvantage and men's advantage in the workplace. Only when these politics are recognized, confronted and transformed will engineering careers be more equitable.     

Latin American Identity Politics: Redefining Citizenship

Identity‐based social movements and politics have played an important role in Latin America since the 1970s and continue to do so today. In this essay, I argue that this form of politics – as it has taken shape across Latin America – has been defined by its intersectionality. I trace the ways in which neoliberalism has facilitated a certain kind of identity politics while limiting more radical political claims. I argue that identity politics have contributed to the current “pink tide” sweeping across the continent and are in continual dialogue with these new leftist governments as they redefine what it means to be citizen and what the relationship between state and citizen should be.     

Embedded expertise: a conceptual framework for reconstructing knowledge orders,their transformation and local specificities

The role of science in modern democracies has long been a topic of heated debate. Recent scholarship has increasingly focused on the social construction of the science–policy–politics nexus. For understanding both the local specificity of concrete configurations and general trends much is to be gained from an analytical framework. In a first introductory section we describe already existing categorizations and typologies, identifying a research gap: a framework for reconstructing the discursive forces shaping the science–policy–politics interface based on both mutually exclusive and exhaustive categories. Our answer is the concept of knowledge orders. Building on already existing scholarship in this field, we define knowledge orders as discursive orders structuring the production of expertise. We distinguish between three levels of knowledge orders: the generation and communication of science-based expertise, the regulation of these processes, and reflexive discourses in which the epistemic authority and the political relevance of science-based expertise are (de)legitimized and renegotiated and the regulation of the science–policy–politics nexus debated. Each level can be analyzed in terms of the criteria based on which competence is attributed (social dimension) and at when political or scientific criteria of relevance and validity are to be applied (procedural dimension). The framework is illustrated by referring to both well-known examples in science studies and our own research on science–policy–politics arrangements in the field of food safety and employment policy.