Enactments

Exploring how social science methods enact worlds as well as how various citizenships, mobilities and (in)securities are enacted.

To enact is to bring worlds into being: to shape, create, and make them happen. The Enactments Programme begins with the basic proposition that people and things are neither pre-given nor in any simple way constructed, but are dynamically brought into being, sustained and/or abandoned through various practices. This includes knowledge practices, which not only represent but also are actively enrolled in shaping, creating and making the worlds that they ostensibly seek to investigate and represent. Scholars involved in this research programme engage a wide range of approaches, exploring how social science methods enact worlds as well as how various citizenships, mobilities and (in)securities are enacted. Critically, the Enactments Programme emphasizes how objects and subjects are contested, resisted and transformed. Taking the intertwinement of method, knowledge and being as central, the Enactments Programme thus asks a series of political questions about the kinds of worlds that we contribute to making.

The Enactments Programme in part develops out of work carried out under the former Securities Programme, including that carried out under the four thematic strands of:

The Enactments Programme continues to undertake research into every day and extraordinary forms of governmental practice, into contemporary relations of domination and resistance, and into complex processes of de- and re-politicisation, specifically by exploring the dynamic ways in which such processes are involved in shaping, making and creating the worlds in which we live.

Programme Directors: Evelyn Ruppert and Vicki Squire