Power in Practice Network (PiPN)

The PiPN focuses on not on theories of power, but rather on how power operates in practice,. This implies, a focus on  how power operates through everyday interactions and the material infrastructures through which power is produced and enabled. This entails an analysis of the (a-liberal/illiberal origins of) the socio-technical and ecological arrangements that have historically empowered (and provided a context of normalization for) politics associated with liberal modernity; an emphasis on the contingency and historical peculiarity of the forms of knowledge and expertise that took shape within these arrangements and the power that emerges from these forms of knowledge; and attention to the ways life (human and non-human) and natural agencies are made amenable to particular modes of government and political intervention. The (often violent and essentially colonial) work of reassembling life and nature into arrangements that empower liberal states and markets is not only situated in the past (a kind of original sin). It is going on all around us.

The work of the PiPN explores ow power is produced and deployed through, contemporary,historical and geopolitical relations such as colonialism, capitalism, racism, development and democracy, as well as how power is contested through collective action and the promotion of alternative forms of knowledge and being in the world. The emphasis on practice is a crucial critical move insofar as it challenges the autonomy of the seemingly abstract forces associated with (for example) globalization and the market.

PiPN focusses on decolonizing knowledge and globalizing intellectual histories, the socio-technical and ecological foundations of political power, the illiberal origins/foundations of liberal modernity, techno-politics, the ongoing (and performative) interplay between science and (colonial) world-making; the ultimate dependence of science on non-scientific ways of knowing and the creation of channels through which science might be enriched by other traditions of seeing and forms of knowledge, situating the themes of colonialism, capitalism, racism, development and democracy in deeper dialogue with each other to understand them as integrated geopolitical processes.