Call for Papers
Interpretive Policy Analysis (IPA) Conference
5-7 July 2017
Department of Politics and Public Policy, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK
Sponsored by the Ideology and Discourse Analysis programme, Department of Government, University of Essex
Email: IPAconference2017@dmu.ac.uk
Website: http://www.dmu.ac.uk/about-dmu/schools-and-departments/leicester-business-school/politics-and-public-policy/interpretive-policy-analysis-ipa-conference.aspx
Deadline 17th February 2017
The organisers of the 12th international conference on Interpretive Policy Analysis invite proposals for papers. Authors should submit the details of their papers, including an abstract of no more than 300 words, to the
conference email at: IPAconference2017@dmu.ac.uk.
Proposals should include: panel number; paper title; name, role, institutional affiliation and email address; abstract (no more than 300 words).
*Please consider submitting to Panel 18: The instabilities of expertise: power and knowledge in populist times *
Panel Convenors:
John Clarke, The Open University, UK (john.clarke@open.ac.uk)
Paul Stubbs, The Institute of Economics, Zagreb, Croatia (pstubbs@eizg.hr)
Mislav Zitko, Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences, The University of Zagreb, Croatia (mislav.zitko@gmail.com)
Panel Proposal:
The recent resurgence of populist politics has called into question the place of expertise in political and policy processes. Indeed, new forms of populism have found it politically productive to contest established formations of expertise on, for example, the necessities of economic policy, the ever closer union of Europe, the workings of constitutional law and climate change. In many parts of the overdeveloped world, politicians have played the populist card, insisting that it is better to trust the wisdom of “the people” rather than rely on scientific, technocratic or expert judgement. Paradoxically, these same politicians are not averse to authoritarian measures to subdue the will of the same “people” when it threatens their hegemony.
We see these disruptions of relationships between power, knowledge and politics as marking a distinctive shift in political discourse and creating new possibilities and contradictions in processes of governing, albeit with echoes in previous iterations of ‘authoritarian populism’. Crucially, they reconfigure imaginaries of what it means to govern and be governed, sharing a perverse resonance with radical critiques of ‘evidence-based policies’ and challenging constructions of there being ‘no alternative’.
In this panel we aim to explore these disruptions of established formations of knowledge, power and politics, and we welcome papers, both historical and contemporary, that explore:
• Populist incursions against established expertise;
• Populist formations of knowledge-power;
• The implications for established knowledge-power formations; and/or
• The possibilities of counter-knowledges that might be articulated with alternative forms of radical politics.
