Structure in Motion

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

The "structural" paradigm is one of the most important frameworks for understanding the perpetuation of power and privilege in the contemporary era, if not the dominant framework. This paradigm helps us to understand deep inequalities that fall along group lines at a time when majorities support racial, gender, and sexual equality in principle. It also helps us understand why purportedly “revolutionary” uprisings often feed the status quo. The papers that constitute this panel engage this important analytical paradigm and the concept at the heart of it, seeking clarity on what structure means, probing the concept and paradigm’s limitations, examining efforts to overcome these limitations, and considering how fresh takes on structure might serve social and political analysis -- our understanding of populism included. Callum Ingram's paper considers the structural mechanisms by which affect moves through, unites, and distinguishes collectives. Drawing on Raymond Williams' account of "structures of feeling," he considers the empowering and problematic implications of affective populism for democratic empowerment. Colin Kielty’s contribution explores how infrastructure at once parallels and departs from structure as a conceptual and normative rubric. Drawing from critical instrustructure studies, Kielty argues that a politics of “repair,” “care” and “maintenance” towards the social, material and intellectual infrastructures that sustain political action should complement, and sometimes displace, the more conventional politics of “resistance,” “dismantling” and abolishing constraining or oppressive structures. Greta Snyder’s paper critiques a well know effort to develop a framework that addresses the perceived limitations of the structural framework: Desmond S. King and Rogers M. Smith’s “racial orders” framework. Though the racial orders framework injects more dynamism into our understanding of race relations and racial politics, it nonetheless problematically limits the sources of structural change to the political realm and to human agents. Snyder suggests an ecological framework does more to help us understand stasis and change in race relations over time than either a structural racism or racial orders framework. By rethinking the idea of “structure” as it exists against, for, and behind populist movements, then, this panel (1) critiques the ways that political thought has both enabled and constrained our ability to understand popular politics, (2) offers several original interpretations of the conditions of populist politics, and (3) finds forms of democratic politics that are often overlooked in the “structure-agency” debate. By engaging social structure as a site of dynamic contestation, intention, and agency, the panel seeks to find new political life in some old social theory.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Individual Presentations

• The Structural Conditions of Democratic Feeling - Callum Ingram, University of Nevada Reno

• Infrastructural Injustice - Colin Kielty, University of Richmond

• Critiquing the “Racial Orders” Framework from an Ecological Perspective - Greta Fowler Snyder, Williams College

Chair

• Emily Beausoleil Victoria University of Wellington

Discussant

• Emily Beausoleil Victoria University of Wellington