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Reoccupying the political: transforming political science

The papers gathered in this collection emerged from a symposium concerned with the question of the political as subject, practice and epistemology. In part, the symposium evolved from a recognition of the political struggles across the globe that are reoccupying the political. Examples of these re-occupations include (but are not restricted to) Occupy in the USA, los Indignados in Spain and the Movimento sem Terra in Brazil (Landless Workers Movement, MST). Occupations of rural and urban space are creating new forms of politics and political practices involving new temporalities and counter-spatialities that are typically characterised by commitments to dialogue, mutuality and autogestion. Multidimensional in character these movements encompass geographical, temporal and embodied processes that eschew accepted institutional pathways. They challenge the idea that democracy must be organised and managed by political and intellectual elites with civil society politics confined to a politics of (and on) demand. They share a palpable desire for a politics in which people have control over decisions and processes affecting their lives. But just as importantly, these reoccupations of the political pointed to a second set of issues, namely how political science, as a global discipline often embedded within representational understandings of the political, produces both itself and its knowledge of the world. Hence an equally important consideration for those participating in the symposium was the exploration of implications of the multidimensional global reoccupation of the political for the methodological, conceptual and epistemological practices of political science as currently constituted; the nature of disciplinarity itself. The symposium thus provided an opportunity for scholars committed to critical engagement with such post-representational reoccupations of the political to prefigure a dialogical and open space of intellectual sharing, reflection and knowledge creation across difference. There has been a plethora of new forms of democratic politics and practices present in both the Global South and Global North. These innovative forms of popular democratisation often escape the confines of liberal representative understandings of the political common to mainstream political science. Rather, we encounter an explicit focus on the development of place-based horizontal forms of institutionality and democratic life in which communities make local decisions about matters of collective importance such as housing, health, urban development and education. Emerging attempts to conceptualise these popular democratising experiences have developed a number of frameworks including prefigurative, autonomous, post-representational, indigenous, decolonial and horizontal politics (Sitrin, 2006 (Horizontalism); Karatzogianni & Robinson, 2009 (autonomous); Lugones, 2010 (decolonial); Motta, 2011 (prefigurative)). Such accounts often question