Blurring Genres Network: Recovering the Humanities for Political Science and Area Studies - ‘Politics as Anthropology and Area Studies’

Jan Kubik

Professor Jan Kubik is the Director of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. Previously he taught at Rutgers University. His publications include: The Power of Symbols against the Symbols of Power. The Rise of Solidarity and the Fall of State Socialism in Poland and Rebellious Civil Society: Popular Protest and Democratic Consolidation in Poland, 1989-1993 (with Grzegorz Ekiert). Recent work deals with the relationship between political science and cultural anthropology (Anthropology and Political Science: a convergent approach, with Myron Aronoff); critical analysis of post-communist studies (Postcommunism from Within. Social Justice, Mobilization, and Hegemony, edited with Amy Linch); and the politics of memory (Twenty Years After Communism: The Politics of Memory and Commemoration, prepared and edited with Michael Bernhard).

Rod Rhodes

Rod Rhodes is Professor of Government (Research) at the University of Southampton, Visiting Professor, University of Utrecht; and Adjunct Professor, Griffith University, Australia. Previously, he was the Director of the UK Economic and Social Research Council’s ‘Whitehall Programme’ (1994-1999); Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the Australian National University (2006-11); and Director of the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University (2007-8). He is the author of 19 books including, Networks, Governance and the Differentiated Polity. Selected Essays. Volume I. (Oxford University Press, 2017); Interpretive Political Science. Selected Essays. Volume II (Oxford University Press, 2017); Lessons of Governing. A Profile of Prime Ministers’ Chiefs of Staff (with Anne Tiernan, 2014); Everyday Life in British Government (Oxford University Press, 2011); The State as Cultural Practice (with Mark Bevir, Oxford University Press 2010). He is life Vice-President of the Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom; a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia; and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (UK). He was also editor of Public Administration from 1986 to 2011. He has been awarded many prizes including, in 2015, the
biennial European Consortium for Political Research Lifetime Achievement Award for his ‘outstanding contribution to all areas of political science, and the exceptional impact of his work’.

Emma Crewe

Emma Crewe is a researcher at SOAS (University of London), a research supervisor at the Business School (University of Hertfordshire) and Chair of the international NGO Health Poverty Action. An anthropologist by training, she has worked since the 1980s as an academic, policy adviser, CEO and trustee in international NGOs and grant-makers. She has been researching Parliaments since 1998 and is currently managing a research coalition studying Parliaments and democracy in Bangladesh and Ethiopia with the Hansard Society.

Mark Bevir

Mark Bevir is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley.  He is also a Professor in the Graduate School of Governance, United Nations University - MERIT, Maastricht, Netherlands, and a Distinguished Research Professor in the College of Arts and Humanities, Swansea University, UK. Born in London, Mark was educated at the University of Exeter, where he got a BA (1st Class), and the University of Oxford, where he was awarded a D.Phil.  Before moving to Berkeley, he worked at the University of Madras, India, and the University of Newcastle, UK.  He has had visiting positions in Australia, Finland, France, Italy, the UK, and US.  

Mark is author or co-author of The Routledge Handbook of Interpretive Political Science (with R.A.W. Rhodes) *, Routledge, 2015. He has recently written with C. Needham on Decentring Social Policy: narratives, resistance and practices in the International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy (2017), on Decentring Health Policy with J. Waring (Routledge) (2017) and on Why Political Science is an Ethical Issue with J. Blakely (Political Studies, 2017). He has authored Interpreting Global Security* (with Oliver Daddow and Ian Hall), Routledge, 2014, The Logic of the History of Ideas* (1999), Interpreting British Governance* (2003), New Labour: A Critique (2005), Governance Stories* (2006), Key Concepts in Governance (2009), The State as Cultural Practice (2010), Democratic Governance (2010), The Making of British Socialism (2011), Governance: A Very Short Introduction* (2012), and A Theory of Governance* (2013).  He is the editor of two reference works – The Encyclopaedia of Governance (2007) and The Encyclopaedia of Political Theory (2010) – and the editor or co-editor of Critiques of Capital in Modern Britain and America (2002), Markets in Historical Contexts: Ideas and Politics in the Modern World (2004), Modern Political Science: Anglo-American Exchanges since 1880 (2007), Public Governance* (2007), Histories of Postmodernism (2007), Governance, Consumers, and Citizens: Agency and Resistance in Contemporary Politics (2007), Interpretive Political Science* (2010), The Sage Handbook of Governance (2011), Modern Pluralism: Anglo-American Debates since 1880 (2012. He has published over 150 academic articles.