Toward a Spacious Comparative Politics: Knowledge Production & Outsiders Within

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Comparative political scientists periodically discuss the ‘state of the field’, with scholars considering in-depth how to do comparisons, major research trends, and methodological debates. But the coloniality of comparative political science is far less commonly discussed, with few addressing how hegemonic Western epistemologies are so dominant in the field that they preclude consideration of non-Western approaches (exceptions include Hanchard 2018; Shilliam 2021; Ravecca 2018). Considerations on legitimate and illegitimate knowledge producers and production remain on the margins of comparative politics, if they are addressed at all. We take up these crucial questions in this letter, reflecting on how a refusal to engage with other epistemologies and methodologies result in a narrow understanding of the political world that then leads to a parochial comparative political science that underestimates and underspecifies complex workings of power. In this current political moment of increased global authoritarianism, the preservation of liberal democracies matters, especially for minoritized populations. We cannot fully understand authoritarianism without understanding the raced-gendered nature of politics, and the systems of hierarchy that undergird them.

Through autoethnographic reflection on our respective “outsider-within” positions within comparative political science (Hill Collins 1986), we discuss how counter hegemonic lenses lenses capture nuanced political realities, resulting in a stronger comparative political analysis including a deeper understanding of democracies’ origins and futures. Our analytic reflections discuss the intersections between our non-normative bodies and our non-normative methodologies, highlighting how comparative political science itself can be a site of epistemic violence in its “unstated power dynamics, unquestioned norms and assumptions, and unwarranted generalizations” (Turner 2022). Despite the risks of doing so, we make the case for why a more expansive comparative political science leads to a stronger sub-field that accepts the legitimacy of non-mainstream approaches leads to a stronger sub-field and creates spaces towards shifting how we think about, teach, and research comparative politics.

Sub Unit

• Division 11: Comparative Politics

Individual Presentations

• Epistemic Erasures: Unlearning and Reimagining Comparative Political Science - Ethel Tungohan, York University

• Locating Me in Comparative Politics: Reassessing the Ill-Fitting Comparativist - Erica Townsend-Bell, Oklahoma State University

• Epistemic Resistance and the Politics of Knowledge - Natasha Behl, Arizona State University

• Unlearning Comparative Politics in South Africa and the USA - Robin L. Turner, Butler University

• Understanding Democracy: The Origins of Democratic Conceptualization - Margaret Hanson, Arizona State University; Hannah S Chapman, University of Oklahoma; Valery Dzutsati, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale; Paul Armstrong DeBell, Fort Lewis College

Chair

• Raymond Rocco University of California, Los Angeles

Discussants

• Lisa Baldez Dartmouth College

• Alice Kang University of Nebraska-Lincoln