Critical Studies in Politics—An Introductory Note

Abstract

This note introduces to the readers of this forum a group endeavour called ‘Critical Studies in Politics’ initiated by the teachers–researchers in Political Science located in different Indian universities. The initiative aims to redefine the object of the study of the discipline of political science in its efforts to radically destabilize the disciplinary formations. The note raises critical issues towards restructuring of the discipline of political science in India both in terms of its objects and its methodological approaches. One initial output from this collective activity is Critical Studies in Politics: Exploring Sites, Selves, Power, a collection of essays by a group of political science teachers and researchers (Menon et al., 2014).1 But it is also an endeavour that we hope will have a life beyond this volume in terms of consolidating a change that has already been underway in the discipline. This change has to do with two sets of issues, namely, the way the discipline frames its object and the methodological approaches it sanctions or allows. There was a time when our discipline was not only identified with a more or less derivative ‘application’ of methodological debates in the West, especially US academy, but even its concerns were framed within limits defined by them. Not only was ‘politics’ defined in very rigid terms as what went on in its formal domain—that of parties, electoral behaviour, state policy, decision-making, pressure groups and so on, but there was also an equally inflexible insistence on only certain kinds of quantitative empirical methods. Things began to change from the 1980s onwards and political science too was not immune to these changes though the pace of changes in our discipline has been excruciatingly slow.