Writing Politics

We need to talk about writing. Doing politics differently must mean writing politics differently, and ‘writing politics’ is a collective exploration of how that might work… Most of us work in policy, politics, sociology, law or IR, and we’re...

Doing Politics

is now free to access at doingpolitics.space. I want to write about politics as something people do, to describe a politics grounded in human action and interaction – in the gathering and meeting, talking and writing of embodied and situated human beings…

Seeing Politics

takes up the idea that one of the principal characteristics of action is its visibility, and uses photographs to explore aspects of ‘doing politics’.  It was given online as a keynote presentation to the Critical and Interpretive Public Administration...

What do policy makers really do?

The question is important because making policy engages a great number of people one way or another, and what they do they might do well or badly.  Our standard answers are rather hazy, not least because policy making entails such great numbers of people doing a great...

Doing Politics: research, teaching and practice

For a meeting of the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, 19 November 2018… The aim of this presentation is simply to set out a framework for studying ‘doing politics’, and to discuss ways of using it in teaching as well as...

Gastprofessur in Vienna

 Visiting Professor in the Department of Politics, University of Vienna, 2018-2019, teaching courses in Making Policy, Doing Comparison and Doing Politics and Making Policy at Bachelor’s and Master’s levels respectively… BAK 13: Making policy,...

Good Vibrations

Nice citations, at least, if not ex-citations.  Like lots of us, I guess, most of what I’ve written appears again (if it appears at all) as a name and number, person and date inserted in someone else’s argument, to be read as simple ciphers for the complex...

PhD honoris causa

Awarded the degree of PhD honoris causa by the University of Liège, 19 March 2016. It’s a tremendous personal honour, but also recognition of a longstanding, exciting collaboration with members of the Centre de Recherches et Interventions Sociologiques...

Knowing Governance

Knowing Governance. The epistemic construction of political order is edited by Jan-Peter Voß and Richard Freeman, and sets out to understand governance through the design and making of its models and instruments. What kinds of knowledge do they require and...

Doing Politics in Translation

was the title of the 14th Kåte Hamburger lecture given at the Centre for Global Cooperation in Duisburg in October… How does politics happen? When we do politics, what are we doing? In answering this question, I return to Hannah Arendt’s The Human...

Doing Democracy

was a panel Darcy Leigh organized at this year’s Policy & Politics conference, with additional papers by Oliver Escobar, Deborah Holman and Sophie Thunus… What is democracy made of? How is it done? It is an idea and a set of institutions, to be sure,...