Studying Politics Today

This title examines what political scientists are studying - and how they are doing it - in ways that could improve our world. It features scholars in political science and related fields, who are engaged in research that is more politically relevant than the work that continues to dominate the larger discipline.

By combining disciplinary critiques with alternative approaches to political science, this book provides innovative and progressive perspectives on the study of politics today. This book was published as a special issue of New Political Science: A Journal of Politics and Culture.

1. Introduction: Studying Politics Today: Critical Approaches to Political Science Nancy S. Love and Mark Mattern 2. The Intellectual Origins of New Political Science Clyde W. Barrow 3. Stultifying Politics Today: The "Natural Science" Model in American Political Science-How is it Natural, Science, and a Model? Timothy W. Luke 4. Political Political Science: A Phronetic Approach Sanford F. Schram, Bent Flyvbjerg and Todd Landman 5. A Post-Parsimonious Proposition Alix Olson 6. A Peculiar Blind Spot: Why did Radical Political Theory Ignore the Rampant Rise in Inequality Over the Past Thirty Years? Joseph M. Schwartz 7. Rethinking Resistance and the Cultural Politics of Occupy Kara Dellacioppa, Sergio Soto and Alan Meyer 8. Occupy the Social Contract! Participatory Democracy and Iceland's Crowd-Sourced Constitution Susan Burgess and Christine (Cricket) Keating 9. Deep Presidency: Toward a Structural Theory of an Unsustainable Office in a Catastrophic World-Obama and Beyond William F. Grover 10. Essentially Contested Subjects: Some Ontological and Epistemological Considerations When Studying Homosexuals and Terrorists Shawn Schulenberg 11. The Politics of Space and the Spatialisation of Politics: New Directions for Examining the Connections between Immigration and Contagion Jed Horner and John Rule 12. The Case for a Postcolonial Approach to the Study of Politics Uday Chandra 13. For What Do We Cheer? Nietzsche, Moral Stands, and Social Movement Research Cyrus Ernesto Zirakzadeh 14. The Art of Not Being Quite So Governed: An Examination of the Work of the "Critical" Journal Elisabeth Chaves