“The challenge of writing about democratic politics is to be unsparing about its reality without abandoning faith in its ideals.”
Michael Ignatieff, 2013, Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics. Harvard University Press.
Monthly Archives: December 2014
Bite Size Theory: The Politics of Suffering and Smiling
“The study of politics is concerned with power. It normally starts from things as they are supposed to be: individuals competing for resources within a given socio-economic framework. But perhaps this is the problem: what we set out to discover is what we know already because we have a sense of how the political system works. What we need to do is to come to the question of politics from a different angle – one that enables us to cast a different light on what is happening, for it is the light we cast, the questions we ask, which ultimately determines what we see.”
Patrick Chabal, 2009, Africa: The Politics of Suffering and Smiling, London, Zed Books.
Bite Size Theory: On the Postcolony
“By defining itself both as an accurate portrayal of Western modernity – that is, by starting from conventions that are purely local – and as universal grammar, social theory has condemned itself always to make generalizations from idioms of a provincialism that no longer requires demonstration since it proves extremely difficult to understand non-Western objects within its dominant paradigms.”
Achille Mbembe, 2001, On the Postcolony, University of California Press.
Power and Space in the City
Details here of a series of workshops on the theme of Power and Space in the City, organised by Liza Griffin and others at the Bartlett School and the OU.
Pop Theory 