A new book, edited by Reader in Law and UKRI Future Leaders Fellow Dr Connal Parsley (Kent Law School), with co-editors James Martel, Başak Ertür and Naveed Mansoori, and excellent contributions from so many innovative thinkers, has been published by Routledge.
The Routledge Handbook on the Lived Experience of Ideology is an authoritative key reference text for students, academics, and researchers of ideologies, critical theory, feminism, postcolonial theory, affect theory, political theory, critical legal studies, political science, and, more broadly, sociology, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and cultural and communication studies.
Connal explains that ‘with this volume we set out to push ‘ideology’ to encounter ‘lived experience’ (especially via Franz Fanon), as a way of thinking about ideology alongside ‘the senses, embodiment, and bodily practices; with relationality, identification, and identity; with media, affect and atmospheres; as well as with materiality … space … custom and habit’. For me the core achievement of this approach is to think ideology together with contemporary approaches to materiality. We do this by extending and expanding the ‘political’ in both Althusser’s ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, and in contemporary ideology studies that see it more as an essential part of organisational patterning. Building on these, we propose that ideology should not be seen as ‘ideal’, or as discrete from other theoretical hermeneutics that reject dualist ontologies. We suggest ideology is necessary rather than being able to be overcome, but for this reason must be even more carefully analysed in terms of its power effects. Finally, we question ideology’s unity, embracing (and endorsing) its necessarily pluralistic quality – a task that was helped by the great diversity of approaches taken by the authors.
After literally years of thinking about it, we organised the volume through 8 categories: ‘Thinking: the shape of ideology’, ‘Reading: Ideology as theory and practice’, ‘Existing: Ideology as container’, ‘Antagonisms: Ideology as culture and identity’, ‘Nature: Ideology and the Anthropocene’, ‘Instituting: The Sedimentation of Ideology’, ‘Desiring: Ideology and corporeality’, and ‘Lives within ideology’.’
Learn more / order your copy here.