Making al-Qa’ida legible: Interpretive methods, secrets, and mess (Sarah Phillips, Sydney)
Seminar
This seminar will explore two broad, but ultimately unreconcilable, understandings of what al-Qa’ida in Yemen ‘really is’: one legible, organisationally rational and thus governable; and one not entirely so. I’ll argue that the divergence between these two ontologies matters—and is even part of the…
In Two Minds: The role of Ambivalence in Political Preferences and the ‘Democratic Dilemma’
Seminar
Escalating concerns about citizen distrust and loss of support for representative democracy have driven an expansion in empirical research on political attitudes and process preferences. Citizen support is deemed the necessary scaffolding for stable democracy. Yet drawing inferences about how…
Gender responsive budgeting and the financing of maternity care in the Australian federation: addressing gender equality including in emergencies and disasters
Webinar/Online
Registration and Zoom details are available here. This webinar is the next in the “Human Rights, Gender Budgeting and Progressing Breastfeeding in 2020 and Beyond, Series”, and will be held on Monday, 29 April 2024, 6:00 PM -8:00 PM Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST). The webinar is…
Interpretive Political Science as a Tool for Understanding Policy Making in Practice (Sarah Ball, Melbourne)
Seminar
Policy-making is an ongoing process of negotiation and mediation of meaning but this side of policy often goes unnoticed, made up of ‘hundreds of practical judgments, the everyday, taken-for-granted-routines and practices’ (Wagenaar). This research draws on key concepts from Bevir and Rhodes’s…
Authoritarianism, Elections, and Partisan Sorting
Seminar
There has been a great deal of recent attention to democratic backsliding and growing authoritarian around the world. What’s missing, however, is an account of how authoritarianism can become a major determinant of voting in democratic nations. Using three decades of election survey data in the U.S…
Precolonial states and postcolonial democratisation
Seminar
Existing studies suggest that historical states have been an impediment to democratisation because they resisted the colonial transmission of nascent democratic institutions. However, I argue that existing theories do not explain democratisation in “late-decolonized states” well, which were…
Book Launch: 'The Radical Jewish Tradition: Revolutionaries, resistance fighters and firebrands'
Book launch
Before the Second World War, the majority of Jews were working class and part of a wider struggle alongside their non-Jewish comrades on the left. The book celebrates Jewish radicalism from the Tsarist Empire to Poland and Germany, from London to New York. To illuminate this background, the issue…