Mapping Judicialization: On the Politics of Methodological Pluralism

• In Event: Positionality and Reflexivity in Political Science I: The Domestic Context

Abstract

This paper draws on participant observation research in the field of comparative public law, and directly addresses epistemological issues that are central to multi-methods political science inquiry. It does so by reflecting on the role of researchers' identities within the process of knowledge production associated with one distinct genre of intellectual labor: the authorship of a review essay.

Publishers of annual reviews insist that these compendia do more than assemble literature reviews on a given topic; indeed, the genre is explicitly presented as open and welcoming toward multi-method and interpretive political inquiry, even as the precise nature of the successful review essay remains ineffable and the standards for commissioning work in this genre of scholarship are rarely explicitly articulated. As publication venues for review essays multiply, and the genre of scholarship acquires increasing prestige, the intellectual labor committed to its production carries the potential to enhance our ability as political scientists to recognize conceptual plurality, appreciate contestation among ideas, and engage with relevant political projects. At the same time, the discipline's increasing investment in publishing the review essay genre holds the risk of re-igniting the methodologically-based power struggles to which Political Science has previously proved susceptible.

Drawing upon my practical participation in a cross-method collaborative effort within the subfield of Comparative Public Law, which aimed to produce a successful review essay on the topic of judicialization, I reflexively trace how existing hierarchical relations among methodologies and modes of political inquiry are produced and reproduced within this genre of scholarship. My analysis is grounded on the insight that review essays are at their core an exercise in mapping, a mode of knowledge production that – particularly in its material, cartographic form – historically has been closely associated with European imperialism and colonialism. It has long been recognized that maps of continental Africa and other, as yet, uncharted territories historically enabled and legitimated European conquest. So too, I contend, the project of "covering important developments in a field of political inquiry" is inseparable from colonizing and/or imperial tendencies so long as mapping is enacted via the disciplining technique of distinguishing acceptable from unacceptable scholarship (especially when the latter is ignored or disparaged not because it is less thorough or well-argued but because it fails to conform to abstract definitional formulas of the phenomena in question).

Drawing upon my own engagement with the authorship of a review essay in the field of Comparative Public Law, I recount how my positionality as a multiethnic female scholar of Palestinian descent, and my attendant lived experience with evolving processes of racialization within the academy, have informed my understanding of these disciplining techniques. Specifically, my analysis details how the encounter of positivist and non-positivist approaches within the review essay genre, and their differential claims to disciplinary authority, produces not only conceptual incommensurability but also a range of framings, narratives, and performances that selectively efface some forms of intellectual labor. My reflexive analysis highlights the intersection of method and politics, by lifting up the often-overlooked contributions of those mapping efforts undertaken not as exercises in regulating scholarly production but rather as attempts in conducting a pluralistic archaeology of knowledge -- what I term mapping-as-genealogy.

Author

• Leila Kawar, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor