Locating Me in Comparative Politics: Reassessing the Ill-Fitting Comparativist

• In Event: Toward a Spacious Comparative Politics: Knowledge Production & Outsiders Within

Abstract

It is a known truism that the majority of early career graduate students have no idea what they are doing, and similar uncertainty about what their topics of inquiry will be. The expectation is that this pattern shifts over time and students become more certain about their fit, their methods, questions and interlocutors. But what happens when they don’t? When the work of fitting oneself to the discipline and the subfield remains incomplete? The traditional response might be that perhaps the discipline or subfield are not the right fit, perhaps even the graduate degree itself. Perhaps a parting of ways is best. But what if the problem of a fit is of a partial, rather than a complete nature? And what if the problem is rooted in the often unrecognized oversights of the discipline and the field? This paper considers the issue of fit in Comparative Politics and Political Science. I explore my trajectory in Comparative Politics from uncertain graduate student to more certain professor, from ill-fitting Comparative graduate student to still ill-fitting Comparative scholar. I discuss my growing recognition that the roots of this problem stem from the combination of the important tools and methods that Comparative does offer, alongside the critical questions it does not. That is, much attention to the presence and impact of race, hierarchy and other identity based inequalities at all. And even less to fundamental questions regarding the formation, and ongoing enactions and interactions of identitarian processes central to understanding politics and the settings in which they emerge and form. I address the work required to find, learn, and combine the methods, tools, and interlocutors necessary to ask and engage the questions that I care about and, I argue, that Comparative Politics should as well.

Author

• Erica Townsend-Bell, Oklahoma State University