Whose politics and which science? Rethinking the discipline in the context of Australian settler colonial relationships

Abstract

In the United Kingdom and America, political scientists are involved in increasingly intense conversations about the implication of the discipline in racial and colonial hierarchies. As a recent volume by Bhambra, Gebrial and Nisancioglu begins, ‘the call to decolonise univeristies across the global north has gained particular traction in recent years’ (2018, 1). In the contemporary ‘post-race’ world, these interventions insist on the importance of naming and challenging ongoing inequalities and role of disciplinary knowledge in maintaining them. In 2016, Kennan Ferguson asked in Perspectives on Politics ‘Why Does Political Studies Hate American Indians?’, and in 2018, two key edited volumes..