New paper in Political Geography, ‘What Repoliticisation Means and Requires: Creating the Climate for Disagreement’.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103222
The paper conceptualises repoliticisation within post-foundational political geography. Noting repoliticisation tends to be equated with politicisation, it argues that repoliticisation is about enacting, or opening the door to, politicisations in depoliticised times.
Conceptualising repoliticisation as ‘the undoing of depoliticisations’ encourages a consideration for how depoliticisation can be undone from within existing orders. Prompting questions about how existing subjects (inc. those considered to be agents of depoliticisation) can work towards the undoing of post-politics, depoliticisation, and more politically open futures.
Empirically, the paper draws upon scholar activism and an auto-ethnography of my own accounting (an ‘auto-ethnoaccount’) for Manchester’s carbon emissions, a practice often understood as a technology of depoliticisation.
I explore how accountants might break the depoliticising perception that there is a singular carbon accountability that can be perfectly reported as a number, seeking to reinstate the possibility for political disagreement around the city’s aviation emission responsibility.