Department Research Seminar

Join us this coming Thursday for the final research seminar of this term, free coffee and cake at the seminar and drinks in the Politics Reception area afterwards.

Dr José Ciro Martinez

Tactics at the Bakery

This paper explores a set of actions through which bakers manipulate laws and regulations that seek to organize and regulate how they do business. It builds on eighteen months of fieldwork conducted in Jordan, twelve of which were spent working in three different bakeries in the capital, Amman. Moving away from the idea that public policies are simply imposed from above, the paper looks in detail at the social relations through which they are enacted. By honing in on the bakery, and examining arrangements between bakery owners, workers, consumers and ministerial employees, it illuminates modes of political agency that escape conventional binaries of domination/resistance, state/society, and legality/illegality. I argue against seeing these practices as easily categorized forms of resistance or frivolous acts of corruption. Nor are they simply reinforcements of hegemonic control. Instead, tactics at the bakery subvert the order of things to serve other ends. Foregrounding them in this analysis seeks not only to challenge views of power relations as strictly binary but to elucidate some of the ways in which citizens inhabit and engage with the neoliberal and authoritarian logics that pervade everyday life in Jordan. 

Dr Alfred Moore

Serious Play: On the Play Element in Democratic Politics (with Michael MacKenzie, University of Pittsburgh)

The language of play is all over democratic politics. But it is used in two very different ways. On the one hand, it is used to show how democracy goes wrong, when politicians are ‘playing games’ or doing ‘political theatre’ or when partisans behave like sports fans. On the other hand the language of play is routinely used to capture central normative features of democracy, like the ‘rules of the game’ and the ‘level playing field.’ These uses of the language of play seem contradictory, but we argue that they are two sides of the same coin. Further, we want to convince you that play is a constitutive element of democratic politics, that we cannot separate game-playing from democratic politics, and that we should not want to. In this talk I will give an overview of our project, and introduce one part of it, a discussion of the value of pretence and pretending.