Emily Beausoleil
Biographic Data
| ID | 140936 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Emily Beausoleil |
| GIVEN NAMES | Emily |
| FAMILY NAME | Beausoleil |
| SIGNATURE | BEAUSOLEIL E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Victoria University of Wellington |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7923-3514 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 98 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Theatre, Spectatorship, Politics
Democracy in Aotearoa
Solidarity and Deliberation After Extremist Attacks: Exploring a Complex Interplay
Signs of Democratic Resilience Following Aotearoa New Zealand’s March 15th Mosque Attacks
Political responses to extremist attacks and other forms of social trauma might be deemed ‘resilient’ insofar as they restore order and security but can undermine democratic ideals and practices. This article offers an evaluative framework for democratic resilience to make sense of public discourse in the aftermath of extremist attacks. We argue that a democratically resilient response entails five necessary dimensions, each of which is required …
Bouncing Back or Forward? Two Approaches to Democratic Resilience After Extremist Attacks
Violent extremist attacks pose a serious threat to democracy, undermining its institutions, norms and practices. This article examines the disruptive impact of violent extremism on the public sphere and considers the role of political leaders in responding to these challenges. Leaders are widely recognised as the key actors shaping the public discourse after extremist attacks, by either reinforcing or resisting the division intended by these atta…
Decolonizing Deliberation: Experiments from Aotearoa New Zealand
Deliberative processes are an antidote to despair about the inadequacies of politics-as-usual, but the “deliberative wave” (OECD 2021) of these initiatives around the globe has the potential, in some contexts, to be the latest face of colonization. In Aotearoa New Zealand, one project has worked since 2019 to design a climate assembly that enacts Te Tiriti o Waitangi (1840) obligations to honour Māori political authority. This article outlines th…
The Politics of Performance and Performance Scholarship: Performance, Resistance and Refugees edited by Suzanne Little, Samid Suliman and Caroline Wake Oxford and New York, NY: Routledge, 2023; pp. 19…
What is the political work of performance in the context of the so-called refugee crisis? Is it a politics of representation, bringing to the stage and thus public attention what (and who) is too o
Towards a tika political science: Restoring balance, reflecting our context
This article is a rejoinder to two previous articles about the political science discipline in Aotearoa New Zealand published in The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education: Annie Te One and Maria Bargh's "Towards a Fairer and More Tika Political Science and Politics: Are Political Science Programs Equipping Students Adequately for Aotearoa Realities?" (vol. 52, no. 2) and Jack Vowles's "Fairness, Tika and Political Science in Aotearoa New Zea…
Breathing Space—Germinations of Decolonial Allyship
This is Not Us/This is Us: Dissensus Politics in the Wake of the Christchurch Terror Attacks
On March 15th, 2019, a terrorist targeted two mosques in Christchurch, resulting in 51 deaths and many more injured. In the wake of these events, the Aotearoa New Zealand community struggled to make sense of what they meant for who “we” are. This article traces developments and tensions within the discourse that emerged in the two weeks following the attacks, identifying three significant framings: discourses of unity, innocence, and responsibili…
West By Not West: Comparative Democratic Theory is Constellational
In 2020, Alexander Weiss introduced the idea of “comparative democratic theory” (CDT). For it to work, argues Weiss, a comparativist must first: “(1) identify relevant cases of non-Western democratic thought” (such as socialist democracy, Hungarian-style up to 1989, see Milan Pap in this issue for more); “(2) interpret the [text/s on that or those cases] from a globally comparative perspective; and (3) play back conceptual insight from the [text/…
The Poet and the Pragmatist: Cross-Sectoral Insights Against the Grain and for Activist Politics
Claims of structural injustice are difficult to hear for those in positions of social advantage, where listening and response are needed most. Most activist strategies focus primarily on “disruptive” politics, which exerts pressure on decision-makers via a pragmatics of directness, expediency, and force. This paper argues that the particular “structures of feeling” that make listening difficult for advantaged groups call for a different kind of a…
Danced movement in human geographic research: A methodological discussion
As central as bodily movement might be to geographic research, its potential as methodology is only beginning to be explored within the discipline. This paper contributes to this emerging scholarship by reviewing recent work from human geography and allied disciplines which acknowledges the importance of embodied knowledges and engages movement‐based methodologies to surface and interrogate them. In this paper we address the relative lack of atte…
Calling in to cut back: Settlers learning to listen for a decolonial future
Clearing the gorse, a particularly aggressive invasive plant, so that native plants can flourish has been used as a potent metaphor for decolonization ( Came, 2014 ), and described as labour appropriate for settlers to perform in the interest of just relations with Indigenous peoples. Yet, this labour is not simply one of negation, for it involves learning to bring one’s group difference alongside that of others rather than continuing to mistake …
Listening obliquely: Listening as norm and strategy for structural justice
Democracy in a Global Emergency: Five Lessons from the Covid-19 Pandemic
As countries around the world went into lockdown, we turned to 32 leading scholars working on different aspects of democracy and asked them what they think about how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted democracy. In this article, we synthesize the reflections of these scholars and present five key insights about the prospects and challenges of enacting democracy both during and after the pandemic: (1) COVID-19 has had corrosive effects on already …
The recognizing body: Physiological dimensions of a democratic norm
However complex and challenging it is understood to be, recognition is still largely examined to date as a disembodied cognitive process. Yet the affective dimensions of recognition cannot be taken for granted, particularly when it is required in contexts of deep diversity and inequality. An examination of the embodied dimensions of recognition sheds light on why, as some recognition scholars observe, recognition is so difficult to achieve. It al…
Gather Your People: Learning to Listen Intergenerationally in Settler-Indigenous Politics
Decolonization requires critical attention to settler logics that reinforce settler-colonialism, yet settler communities, as a rule, operate without a collective sense of identity and history. This article, provoked by Māori protocols of encounter, explores the necessity of developing a sense of collective identity as precursor to meeting in settler-Indigenous politics. It argues that the ability, desire, and experience of being unmarked as a soc…
Listening to Claims of Structural Injustice
Listening appears as elusive as it is crucial to democratic life, particularly in conditions of structural injustice. Dominant groups benefit from histories and habits of inattention and, when enlisted, common responses of denial, defensiveness, and resentment. What lies behind this pervasive and persistent failure to listen to claims of structural injustice by more advantaged groups, and what does this mean for democratic engagement? This paper …
What is Populism? Who is the Populist: A state of the field review (2008-2018)
Both “populism” and “populist” have long been considered ill-defined terms, and therefore are regularly misapplied in both scholarly and popular discourses. This definitional difficulty is exacerbated by the Babelian confusion of voices on populism, where the term’s meaning differs within and between global regions (e.g. Latin America versus Western Europe); time periods (e.g. 1930s versus the present), and classifications (e.g. left/ right, auth…
Resist and Revivify: Democratic Theory in a Time of Defiance
The political space of art: The Dardenne brothers, Arundhati Roy, Ai Weiwei, and Burial
Responsibility as Responsiveness: Enacting a Dispositional Ethics of Encounter
With the normative demand to attend to social difference and an absence of universal evaluative terms with which to do so, recent theory has increasingly turned to the study of the affective rather than epistemological conditions of ethical encounter. This I call a “dispositional ethics” that construes responsibility as responsiveness. Recent articulations of such an ethics, notably in the most current work of Judith Butler, James Tully, Jade Lar…
Mastery of knowledge or meeting of subjects? The epistemic effects of two forms of political voice
Non-Western Theories of Democracy
A conventional story is often told about democracy. It is a story that begins somewhere in the West, some millennia ago. From there, or so this telling goes, democracy spread across the continents; traversing from the familiar epicenters of Western civilization—Athens, London, Washington, Versailles—to the exotic and sometimes alien cultural landscapes in the East. The idea that such a model of democracy, based on an essentially Western set of id…
Responsibility as Responsiveness: Enacting a Dispositional Ethics of Encounter
With the normative demand to attend to social difference and an absence of universal evaluative terms with which to do so, recent theory has increasingly turned to the study of the affective rather than epistemological conditions of ethical encounter. This I call a “dispositional ethics” that construes responsibility as responsiveness. Recent articulations of such an ethics, notably in the most current work of Judith Butler, James Tully, Jade Lar…
Gather Your People: Learning to Listen Intergenerationally in Settler-Indigenous Politics
Decolonization requires critical attention to settler logics that reinforce settler-colonialism, yet settler communities, as a rule, operate without a collective sense of identity and history. This article, provoked by Māori protocols of encounter, explores the necessity of developing a sense of collective identity as precursor to meeting in settler-Indigenous politics. It argues that the ability, desire, and experience of being unmarked as a soc…
Listening to Claims of Structural Injustice
Listening appears as elusive as it is crucial to democratic life, particularly in conditions of structural injustice. Dominant groups benefit from histories and habits of inattention and, when enlisted, common responses of denial, defensiveness, and resentment. What lies behind this pervasive and persistent failure to listen to claims of structural injustice by more advantaged groups, and what does this mean for democratic engagement? This paper …
Listening obliquely: Listening as norm and strategy for structural justice
Democracy in a Global Emergency: Five Lessons from the Covid-19 Pandemic
As countries around the world went into lockdown, we turned to 32 leading scholars working on different aspects of democracy and asked them what they think about how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted democracy. In this article, we synthesize the reflections of these scholars and present five key insights about the prospects and challenges of enacting democracy both during and after the pandemic: (1) COVID-19 has had corrosive effects on already …
Mastery of knowledge or meeting of subjects? The epistemic effects of two forms of political voice
What is Populism? Who is the Populist: A state of the field review (2008-2018)
Both “populism” and “populist” have long been considered ill-defined terms, and therefore are regularly misapplied in both scholarly and popular discourses. This definitional difficulty is exacerbated by the Babelian confusion of voices on populism, where the term’s meaning differs within and between global regions (e.g. Latin America versus Western Europe); time periods (e.g. 1930s versus the present), and classifications (e.g. left/ right, auth…
Only They Breathe: Identity, Agency and the Dancing Body Politic
Calling in to cut back: Settlers learning to listen for a decolonial future
Clearing the gorse, a particularly aggressive invasive plant, so that native plants can flourish has been used as a potent metaphor for decolonization ( Came, 2014 ), and described as labour appropriate for settlers to perform in the interest of just relations with Indigenous peoples. Yet, this labour is not simply one of negation, for it involves learning to bring one’s group difference alongside that of others rather than continuing to mistake …
The politics, science, and art of receptivity
With so much attention on the issue of voice in democratic theory, the inverse question of how people come to listen remains a marginal one. Recent scholarship in affect and neuroscience reveals that cognitive and verbal strategies, while privileged in democratic politics, are often insufficient to cultivate the receptivity that constitutes the most basic premise of democratic encounters. This article draws on this scholarship and a recent case o…
The recognizing body: Physiological dimensions of a democratic norm
However complex and challenging it is understood to be, recognition is still largely examined to date as a disembodied cognitive process. Yet the affective dimensions of recognition cannot be taken for granted, particularly when it is required in contexts of deep diversity and inequality. An examination of the embodied dimensions of recognition sheds light on why, as some recognition scholars observe, recognition is so difficult to achieve. It al…
Non-Western Theories of Democracy
A conventional story is often told about democracy. It is a story that begins somewhere in the West, some millennia ago. From there, or so this telling goes, democracy spread across the continents; traversing from the familiar epicenters of Western civilization—Athens, London, Washington, Versailles—to the exotic and sometimes alien cultural landscapes in the East. The idea that such a model of democracy, based on an essentially Western set of id…
Danced movement in human geographic research: A methodological discussion
As central as bodily movement might be to geographic research, its potential as methodology is only beginning to be explored within the discipline. This paper contributes to this emerging scholarship by reviewing recent work from human geography and allied disciplines which acknowledges the importance of embodied knowledges and engages movement‐based methodologies to surface and interrogate them. In this paper we address the relative lack of atte…
Signs of Democratic Resilience Following Aotearoa New Zealand’s March 15th Mosque Attacks
Political responses to extremist attacks and other forms of social trauma might be deemed ‘resilient’ insofar as they restore order and security but can undermine democratic ideals and practices. This article offers an evaluative framework for democratic resilience to make sense of public discourse in the aftermath of extremist attacks. We argue that a democratically resilient response entails five necessary dimensions, each of which is required …
Bouncing Back or Forward? Two Approaches to Democratic Resilience After Extremist Attacks
Violent extremist attacks pose a serious threat to democracy, undermining its institutions, norms and practices. This article examines the disruptive impact of violent extremism on the public sphere and considers the role of political leaders in responding to these challenges. Leaders are widely recognised as the key actors shaping the public discourse after extremist attacks, by either reinforcing or resisting the division intended by these atta…
Decolonizing Deliberation: Experiments from Aotearoa New Zealand
Deliberative processes are an antidote to despair about the inadequacies of politics-as-usual, but the “deliberative wave” (OECD 2021) of these initiatives around the globe has the potential, in some contexts, to be the latest face of colonization. In Aotearoa New Zealand, one project has worked since 2019 to design a climate assembly that enacts Te Tiriti o Waitangi (1840) obligations to honour Māori political authority. This article outlines th…
West By Not West: Comparative Democratic Theory is Constellational
In 2020, Alexander Weiss introduced the idea of “comparative democratic theory” (CDT). For it to work, argues Weiss, a comparativist must first: “(1) identify relevant cases of non-Western democratic thought” (such as socialist democracy, Hungarian-style up to 1989, see Milan Pap in this issue for more); “(2) interpret the [text/s on that or those cases] from a globally comparative perspective; and (3) play back conceptual insight from the [text/…
Resist and Revivify: Democratic Theory in a Time of Defiance
The politics, science, and art of receptivity
With so much attention on the issue of voice in democratic theory, the inverse question of how people come to listen remains a marginal one. Recent scholarship in affect and neuroscience reveals that cognitive and verbal strategies, while privileged in democratic politics, are often insufficient to cultivate the receptivity that constitutes the most basic premise of democratic encounters. This article draws on this scholarship and a recent case o…
Only They Breathe: Identity, Agency and the Dancing Body Politic
Non-Western Theories of Democracy
A conventional story is often told about democracy. It is a story that begins somewhere in the West, some millennia ago. From there, or so this telling goes, democracy spread across the continents; traversing from the familiar epicenters of Western civilization—Athens, London, Washington, Versailles—to the exotic and sometimes alien cultural landscapes in the East. The idea that such a model of democracy, based on an essentially Western set of id…
Eating anxiety: The perils of food politics
Mastery of knowledge or meeting of subjects? The epistemic effects of two forms of political voice
Resist and Revivify: Democratic Theory in a Time of Defiance
The political space of art: The Dardenne brothers, Arundhati Roy, Ai Weiwei, and Burial
Responsibility as Responsiveness: Enacting a Dispositional Ethics of Encounter
With the normative demand to attend to social difference and an absence of universal evaluative terms with which to do so, recent theory has increasingly turned to the study of the affective rather than epistemological conditions of ethical encounter. This I call a “dispositional ethics” that construes responsibility as responsiveness. Recent articulations of such an ethics, notably in the most current work of Judith Butler, James Tully, Jade Lar…
What is Populism? Who is the Populist: A state of the field review (2008-2018)
Both “populism” and “populist” have long been considered ill-defined terms, and therefore are regularly misapplied in both scholarly and popular discourses. This definitional difficulty is exacerbated by the Babelian confusion of voices on populism, where the term’s meaning differs within and between global regions (e.g. Latin America versus Western Europe); time periods (e.g. 1930s versus the present), and classifications (e.g. left/ right, auth…
Listening to Claims of Structural Injustice
Listening appears as elusive as it is crucial to democratic life, particularly in conditions of structural injustice. Dominant groups benefit from histories and habits of inattention and, when enlisted, common responses of denial, defensiveness, and resentment. What lies behind this pervasive and persistent failure to listen to claims of structural injustice by more advantaged groups, and what does this mean for democratic engagement? This paper …
Democracy in a Global Emergency: Five Lessons from the Covid-19 Pandemic
As countries around the world went into lockdown, we turned to 32 leading scholars working on different aspects of democracy and asked them what they think about how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted democracy. In this article, we synthesize the reflections of these scholars and present five key insights about the prospects and challenges of enacting democracy both during and after the pandemic: (1) COVID-19 has had corrosive effects on already …
The recognizing body: Physiological dimensions of a democratic norm
However complex and challenging it is understood to be, recognition is still largely examined to date as a disembodied cognitive process. Yet the affective dimensions of recognition cannot be taken for granted, particularly when it is required in contexts of deep diversity and inequality. An examination of the embodied dimensions of recognition sheds light on why, as some recognition scholars observe, recognition is so difficult to achieve. It al…
Gather Your People: Learning to Listen Intergenerationally in Settler-Indigenous Politics
Decolonization requires critical attention to settler logics that reinforce settler-colonialism, yet settler communities, as a rule, operate without a collective sense of identity and history. This article, provoked by Māori protocols of encounter, explores the necessity of developing a sense of collective identity as precursor to meeting in settler-Indigenous politics. It argues that the ability, desire, and experience of being unmarked as a soc…
Listening obliquely: Listening as norm and strategy for structural justice
Danced movement in human geographic research: A methodological discussion
As central as bodily movement might be to geographic research, its potential as methodology is only beginning to be explored within the discipline. This paper contributes to this emerging scholarship by reviewing recent work from human geography and allied disciplines which acknowledges the importance of embodied knowledges and engages movement‐based methodologies to surface and interrogate them. In this paper we address the relative lack of atte…
Calling in to cut back: Settlers learning to listen for a decolonial future
Clearing the gorse, a particularly aggressive invasive plant, so that native plants can flourish has been used as a potent metaphor for decolonization ( Came, 2014 ), and described as labour appropriate for settlers to perform in the interest of just relations with Indigenous peoples. Yet, this labour is not simply one of negation, for it involves learning to bring one’s group difference alongside that of others rather than continuing to mistake …
Breathing Space—Germinations of Decolonial Allyship
This is Not Us/This is Us: Dissensus Politics in the Wake of the Christchurch Terror Attacks
On March 15th, 2019, a terrorist targeted two mosques in Christchurch, resulting in 51 deaths and many more injured. In the wake of these events, the Aotearoa New Zealand community struggled to make sense of what they meant for who “we” are. This article traces developments and tensions within the discourse that emerged in the two weeks following the attacks, identifying three significant framings: discourses of unity, innocence, and responsibili…
West By Not West: Comparative Democratic Theory is Constellational
In 2020, Alexander Weiss introduced the idea of “comparative democratic theory” (CDT). For it to work, argues Weiss, a comparativist must first: “(1) identify relevant cases of non-Western democratic thought” (such as socialist democracy, Hungarian-style up to 1989, see Milan Pap in this issue for more); “(2) interpret the [text/s on that or those cases] from a globally comparative perspective; and (3) play back conceptual insight from the [text/…
The Poet and the Pragmatist: Cross-Sectoral Insights Against the Grain and for Activist Politics
Claims of structural injustice are difficult to hear for those in positions of social advantage, where listening and response are needed most. Most activist strategies focus primarily on “disruptive” politics, which exerts pressure on decision-makers via a pragmatics of directness, expediency, and force. This paper argues that the particular “structures of feeling” that make listening difficult for advantaged groups call for a different kind of a…
The Politics of Performance and Performance Scholarship: Performance, Resistance and Refugees edited by Suzanne Little, Samid Suliman and Caroline Wake Oxford and New York, NY: Routledge, 2023; pp. 19…
What is the political work of performance in the context of the so-called refugee crisis? Is it a politics of representation, bringing to the stage and thus public attention what (and who) is too o
Towards a tika political science: Restoring balance, reflecting our context
This article is a rejoinder to two previous articles about the political science discipline in Aotearoa New Zealand published in The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education: Annie Te One and Maria Bargh's "Towards a Fairer and More Tika Political Science and Politics: Are Political Science Programs Equipping Students Adequately for Aotearoa Realities?" (vol. 52, no. 2) and Jack Vowles's "Fairness, Tika and Political Science in Aotearoa New Zea…
Solidarity and Deliberation After Extremist Attacks: Exploring a Complex Interplay
Signs of Democratic Resilience Following Aotearoa New Zealand’s March 15th Mosque Attacks
Political responses to extremist attacks and other forms of social trauma might be deemed ‘resilient’ insofar as they restore order and security but can undermine democratic ideals and practices. This article offers an evaluative framework for democratic resilience to make sense of public discourse in the aftermath of extremist attacks. We argue that a democratically resilient response entails five necessary dimensions, each of which is required …
Bouncing Back or Forward? Two Approaches to Democratic Resilience After Extremist Attacks
Violent extremist attacks pose a serious threat to democracy, undermining its institutions, norms and practices. This article examines the disruptive impact of violent extremism on the public sphere and considers the role of political leaders in responding to these challenges. Leaders are widely recognised as the key actors shaping the public discourse after extremist attacks, by either reinforcing or resisting the division intended by these atta…
Political science (24 works) · Law (22 works) · Politics (22 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Law (20 works) · Psychology (12 works) · Democracy (11 works) · Epistemology (10 works) · Social science (8 works) · Aesthetics (6 works)