ABSTRACT
Occupations of rural and urban space are creating new forms of politics and political practices involving new temporalities and counter-spatialities that are typically characterised by commitments to dialogue, mutuality and autogestion. A two-day symposium, concerning the question of the political as subject, practice and epistemology, provided an opportunity for scholars committed to critical engagement with such post-representational reoccupations of the political to prefigure a dialogical and open space of intellectual sharing, reflection and knowledge creation across difference. Despite the growth of both movement and academic-activist scholarship, there has been little recognition of its importance within mainstream political science. In contradistinction to political science, which has tended to elide, invisibilise and misname these new forms of the political, a literature has emerged in relation to these new forms of popular politics. Participants at the symposium engaged with new forms of the political by asking questions about the foundational concepts, assumptions and research practices of political science as a discipline.
