Engaged Theory Resources

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Below are some readings in grounded and engaged theory. This is a partial and open-end reading list.

Ackerly, Brooke A. 2000. Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ackerly, Brooke, Luis Cabrera, Fonna Forman, Genevieve Fuji Johnson, Chris Tenove, and  Antje Wiener. 2021. “Unearthing Grounded Normative Theory: Practices and Commitments of Empirical Research in Political Theory.” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy: 1-27.

Coulthard, Glen, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. 2016. “Grounded Normativity / Place-Based Solidarity.” American Quarterly 68, 2: 249-255.

Green, Fergus, and Eric Brandstedt. 2021. “Engaged Climate Ethics.” Journal of Political Philosophy 29: 539-563.

Mertens, Donna, Fiona Cram, and Chilisa Bagele. 2013. Indigenous Pathways into Social Research: Voices of a New Generation. Routledge.

Mills, Charles W. 2005. “‘Ideal Theory’ as Ideology.” Hypatia 20, 3: 165-184.

Schatz, Edward, ed. 2009. Political Ethnography: What Immersion Contributes to the Study of Power. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Simpson, Audra, and Andrea Smith. 2014. Theorizing Native Studies. Durham: Duke University Press.

Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. [1999] 2012. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books.

Tully, James. Public Philosophy in a New Key (vol’s 1 & 2), 2008. Cambridge University Press.

Tungohan, Ethel, Leah Levac, and Kimala Price, 2020. “Introduction to dialogues section on socially engaged research and teaching in political science,” Politics, Groups, and Identities 8, 1: 160-63.

Bauböck, Rainer. 2008. “Normative Political Theory and Empirical Research.” In Approaches and Methodologies in the Social Sciences: A Pluralist Perspective, ed. Donatella Della Porta and Michael Keating. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 40-60.

Dienstag, Joshua Foa. 2016. “On Political Theory, the Humanities, and the Social Sciences.” Perspectives on Politics 14, 4: 1083-1089.

Erman, Eva, and Niklas Möller. 2015. “Practices and Principles: On the Methodological Turn in Political Theory.” Philosophy Compass 10, 8: 533-546.

Fishkin, James S., &  Robert C. Luskin. 2005. Experimenting with a Democratic Ideal: Deliberative Polling and Public Opinion. Acta Politica 40(3), 284–298.

Floyd, Jonathan. 2016. “Should Global Political Theory Get Real? An Introduction.” Journal of International Political Theory 12, 2: 93-95.

Herzog, Lisa, and Bernardo Zacka. 2017. “Fieldwork in Political Theory: Five Arguments for an Ethnographic Sensibility.” British Journal of Political Science 49, 2: 763–784.

Longo, Matthew, and Bernardo Zacka. 2019. “Political Theory in an Ethnographic Key.” American Political Science Review 113, 4: 1066-1070.

Nagar, Richa. 2002. “Footloose Researchers, ‘Traveling’ Theories, and the Politics of Transnational Feminist Praxis.”  Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 9 (2):179-186.

Schwartz-Shea, Peregrine, and Dvora Yanow. 2012. Interpretive Research Design: Concepts and Processes. New York, NY: Routledge.

Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. 2014. “Land as Pedagogy:  Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellious Transformation.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3, 3 1-25.

Starblanket, Gina. 2017. “Being Indigenous Feminists: Resurgences against Contemporary Patriarchy.” In Making Space for Indigenous Feminism, 2nd Ed., ed. Joyce Green. Halifax: Fernwood Publications, 21-41.

Symposium on ethnography and participant observation in political science (including political theory). 2017. Special issue of PS: Political Science & Politics. 50, 1: 97-138.

Symposium on Brooke Ackerly’s Just Responsibility, 2020. In The Journal of Global Ethics 16, 1: 95-130.

Tungohan, Ethel. 2020. “Reflections on the Use of Socially Engaged Research in the Social Sciences.” Politics, Groups, and Identities 8, 1: 172-180.

Whyte, Kyle Powys. 2013. “On the Role of Traditional Ecological Knowledge as a Collaborative Concept: A Philosophical Study.” Ecological processes 2, 1: 1-12.

Wolff, Jonathan. 2019. “Method in Philosophy and Public Policy: Applied Philosophy Versus Engaged Philosophy ” In The Routledge Handbook of Ethics and Public Policy, ed. Annabelle Lever and Andrei Poama. London: Routledge, 13-24.

Yanow, Dvora, and Peregrine Schwartz-Shea, eds. 2013 [2006]. Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe.

Zacka, Bernardo, Brooke Ackerly, Jakob Elster, Signy Gutnick Allen, Humeira Iqtidar, Matthew Longo, and Paul Sagar. 2020. “Political Theory with an Ethnographic Sensibility,” Contemporary Political Theory 20, 2: 385-418.

Ackerly, Brooke A. 2008. Universal Human Rights in a World of Difference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ackerly, Brooke A. 2018. Just Responsibility: A Human Rights Theory of Global Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Apostolidis, Paul. 2019. The Fight for Time: Migrant Day Laborers and the Politics of Precarity. New York: Oxford University Press.

Armstrong, Chris. 2022. “Abuse, Exploitation, and Floating Jurisdiction: Protecting Workers at Sea,” Journal of Political Philosophy 30, 1: -25.

Asch, Michael, John Borrows, and James Tully, eds., 2018. Resurgence and Reconciliation: Indigenous-Settler Relations and Earth Teachings. University of Toronto Press.

Blackett, Adelle. 2019. Everyday transgressions: domestic workers’ transnational challenge to international labor law. Cornell University Press.

Bunch, Charlotte. 1990. “Women’s rights as human rights: Toward a re-vision of human rights.”  Human Rights Quarterly 12 (November):486-498.

Cabrera, Luis. 2010. The practice of global citizenship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Confortini, Catia Cecilia. 2012. Intelligent compassion: feminist clinical methodology in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Oxford studies in gender and international relations. New York: Oxford University Press.

Coulthard, Glen Sean. 2014. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.”  The University of Chicago Legal Forum 1,: 139-167.

De Leon, Justin. 2019. “Lakota Experiences of (in)Security: Cosmology and Ontological Security.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 21: 33-62.

Deveaux, Monique. 2015. “The Global Poor as Agents of Justice.”  Journal of Moral Philosophy 12 (2): 125-150.

Deveaux, Monique. 2021. Poverty, Solidarity, and Poor-led Social Movements. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Deveaux, Monique and Vida Panitch. Exploitation: From Practice to Theory. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017.

Dunford, Robin. 2016. The Politics of Transnational Peasant Struggle: Resistance, Rights and Democracy. London: Rowman and Littlefield International.

Kohn, Peggy. 2016. The Death and Life of the Urban Commonwealth. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Loggins, Jared A. and Andrew J. Douglas. 2021. Prophet of Discontent: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Critique of Racial Capitalism. University of Georgia Press.

Fogg-Davis, Hawley G. 2006. “Theorizing Black Lesbians within Black Feminism: A Critique of Same-Race Street Harassment.”  Politics & Gender 2 (01):57-76.

Forman, Fonna. 2018. “Social Norms and the Cross-Border Citizen: From Adam Smith to Antanas Mockus.” In Cultural Agents Reloaded: The Legacy of Antanas Mockus, ed. Carlo Tognato. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 333-356.

Gaventa, John. 1982. Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley. University of Illinois Press.

Getachew, Adom. 2019. Worldmaking After Empire: the Rise and Fall of Self-Determination. Princeton University Press.

Go, Johann. 2020. “Facts, Principles, and Global Justice: Does the ‘Real World’ Matter?” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy: 1-21.

Graf, Sinja. 2021. The Humanity of Universal Crime: Inclusion, Inequality, and Intervention in International Political Thought. New York: Oxford University Press.

Hogan, Brandon, Michael Cholbi, Alex Madva, and Benjamin S. Yost. 2021. The Movement for Black Lives: Philosophical Perspectives. New York: Oxford University Press.

hooks, bell. [1984] 2000. Feminist theory: from margin to center. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.

Johnson, Genevieve Fuji. 2015. Democratic Illusion: Deliberative Democracy in Canadian Public Policy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Winner of the British Columbia Political Science Association Weller Prize for Best Book by a BC Political Scientist 2016.

Johnson, Genevieve Fuji. 2008. Deliberative Democracy for the Future: The Case of Nuclear Waste Management in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Johnson, Genevieve Fuji and Kerry Porth. Forthcoming 2022. “Sex Worker Rights are Human Rights: An Approach to Solidaristic Normative Theory,” International Journal of Feminist Politics.

Keating, Christine. 2011. Decolonizing democracy: transforming the social contract in India. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Lu, Catherine. 2017. Justice and Reconciliation in World Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mansbridge, Jane. 1980. Beyond Adversary Democracy. University of Chicago Press.

Mills, Aaron James (Waabishki Ma’iingan). 2019. Miinigowiziwin: All That Has Been Given for Living Well Together: One Vision of Anishinaabe Constitutionalism, University of Victoria. PhD dissertation.

Moody-Adams, Michele. 2022. Making Space for Justice: Social Movements, Collective Imagination, and Political Hope. New York: Columbia University Press.

Moraga, Cherríe, and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds. [1981] 2002. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Berkeley, CA: Third Woman Press.

Nagar, Richa. 2014. Muddying the waters: coauthoring feminisms across scholarship and activism, Dissident feminisms. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Rafanelli, Lucia M. 2021. Promoting Justice across Borders: The Ethics of Reform Intervention. New York: Oxford University Press.

Reed-Sandoval, Amy. 2020. Socially Undocumented: Identity and Immigration Justice. Oxford University Press.

Ruddick, Sara. 1989. Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace. Boston: Beacon Press.

Shelby, Tommie, and Brandon M. Terry, eds. 2018. To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Simpson, Audra. 2014. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States. Durham: Duke University Press.

Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. 2017. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Tungohan, Ethel. 2013. “Reconceptualizing Motherhood, Reconceptualizing Resistance.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 15, 1: 39-57.

Van Den Anker, Christine. 2008. “Human Rights in Iran: The Ethnography of ‘Others’ and Global Political Theory.” Journal of International Political Theory 4, 2: 265-282.

Vasanthakumar, Ashwini. 2021. The Ethics of Exile: a Political Theory of Exile. Oxford University Press.

Wolff, Jonathan, and Avner De-Shalit. 2007. Disadvantage, Oxford political theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Woodly, Deva. 2022. Reckoning: Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements. Oxford University Press.

Yoshino, Kenji. 2009. “The Epistemic Contract of Bisexual Erasure.” In Feminist and Queer Legal Theory Intimate Encounters, Uncomfortable Conversations, ed. Martha Fineman, Jack E. Jackson and Adam P. Romero. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 201-222.