Graduate Workshop with Pinar Dokumaci
Date
Thursday April 28, 20222:30 pm - 4:30 pm
Location
Virtually over Zoom, Link will be shared prior to the event.All Graduate Students, please join us as we review and discuss Pinar Dokumaci's paper "Relationality, Comparison, and Decolonising Political Theory".
Abstract
Over the last few decades, relationality has become a buzzword across different disciplines of social and political sciences, which has initiated the talks of a “relational turn.†In its broadest sense, relationality offers a critique of individualist models of analysis. The relations within and in-between individuals, societies, institutions, and human and non-human objects are considered not simply as a mode of interaction between separated and disparate entities, but these entities are thought to be “constituting and being constituted by†the relations of which they are part. In this paper, I aim to explore relationality and comparison in political theory, especially concerning comparative political theory. Although the comparative political theory is an emerging subfield that explores the works of “non-Western†political thinkers as well as “non-Western†ideas about politics; the comparison aspect of comparative political theory is not quite novel. Political theorists have been comparing different ideas from different traditions since the establishment of the field. What is novel about the comparative political theory is rather its growing influence and precursory role in “decolonizing†political theory and theorizing from the margins. While this is a meaningful and inspiring effort, the subject of analysis, as well as both the author and audience in this attempt, is still Western. Hence, comparative political theory has also been argued to reproduce the dichotomy that it was set to demolish, which is the separation, if not the divide, between Western and non-Western intellectual traditions. This paper will rethink this puzzle of comparison as a method for decolonizing political theory concerning relationality and address two main questions: Can relationality provide a better normative basis for decolonizing the way we think about political concepts and issues? Should comparative political theory become more relational to respond to the broader decolonial challenges it addresses?