Reimagining World-Making: Ideals, Concepts & Processes of Oppositional Politics

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel explores a world-creating dimension of oppositional (critical) politics. [destructive and constructive dimensions of resistance by theorizing oppositional politics as world creating. While oppositional politics is often defined by efforts to overturn established conventions and institutions, the opposition explored in this panel seeks to inflect the messy, contradictory status quo and to forge better futures from what is already in decline. Through the interconnected themes of eco-emancipation, participatory organizing, freedom that “takes the low road,” and imperial ruins, the papers assess and deploy the conceptual resources available for the project of making alternative worlds.

Elisabeth Anker, in “We Go Low,” asks what kinds of freedom emerge in collective actions that are typically dismissed because they seem debased, inferior, or bad examples. Anker argues that actions that ‘take the low-road’ can radically expand our political vision, and she examines contemporary examples of freedom that willingly traffic in the muck, the uncivilized, and in spaces of ill repute. Sharon Krause, in “Eco-Emancipation,” likewise takes on the ideal of freedom, offering a vision that challenges common conceptions of political liberation. Advocating for a paradigm shift, Krause proposes eco-emancipation as a concept that moves us beyond freedom conceptualized as a type of sovereignty and instead toward an account in which political freedom involves complex interdependence between humans and nonhumans alike. Krause asks us to consider which ideals should guide our world-making endeavors if we are to move beyond exploitative practices and embrace uncertainty and precarity: her response is marked by continuing contestation among the diverse members of the more-than-human communities it sustains. Gaby Nair’s “Participatory Organizing: Democratic Instrument and Ideal,” explores the style of participatory democracy dramatized by the Students for a Democratic Society’s Economic Research and Action Project. This paper, too, exposes the tension between political practice and the images of freedom toward which it aims. It explores how participatory organization confounds the dichotomy between democratic theory and political practice and provides instead a way of thinking political ideals and tactics together. Finally, turning from rehabilitation to ruin, but continuing to resist traditional dichotomies, Jessica Croteau’s “Zombies of Empire and Colonialism” challenges an understanding of ruination as either passive outcome or a series of inevitable events. She recasts ruination as a deliberate and selective political endeavor that devastates specific communities, locations, relationships, and objects. The essay explores the complexities of the dynamic interplay between activity and passivity in the processes of world-making, especially in the context of empire and colonialism.

This panel is oriented around a desire to reevaluate the ideals and concepts appropriate to an oppositional but affirmative politics. The papers challenge the norms that typically govern how we think about the future while also envisioning processes necessary for a better world. The overarching goal is to foster a deeper understanding of how we can collectively engage in intentional world-making that aligns with principles of eco-emancipation and participatory democracy while eschewing narrow standards of acceptability that always benefit elite power structures.

Sub Unit

• Division 42: Critical Political Science (formerly New Political Science)

Individual Presentations

• We Go Low - Elisabeth Robin Anker, George Washington University

• Eco-Emancipation - Sharon R. Krause, Brown University

• Zombies of Empire and Colonialism - Jessica Croteau, Johns Hopkins

Chair

• Jane Bennett Johns Hopkins University

Discussant

• Jane Bennett Johns Hopkins University