What repoliticisation means and requires: Creating the climate for disagreement

Abstract

This paper makes a conceptual distinction between repoliticisation and politicisation and evaluates what this means for post-foundational political geography and its collective endeavour of achieving a more egalitarian future. Post-foundational political geography is being consolidated as a distinct disciplinary subfield. Within the existing body of literature, significant attention has been directed towards depoliticisation and post-politicisation, but repoliticisation is yet to amass the same critical attention. While literature nonetheless considering repoliticisation treats it as almost synonymous with politicisation, in this paper, I argue repoliticisation is more specifically about enacting, or opening the door to, politicisations. To illustrate the case, I draw upon (auto)ethnographic, scholar-activist work, operating as a carbon accountant for the City of Manchester, UK, as part of a wider project evaluating the role experts (could) play in restricting and enabling political change. Taking post-foundational political geography's insistence that expert, technocratic modes of governance depoliticise seriously, and in mobilising this distinction between repoliticisation and politicisation, I explore what existing subjects like accountants can do to repoliticise. Doing so illustrates how repoliticisations could be triggered from within existing orders of politics and demonstrates how repoliticisation and politicisation are overlapping, related, yet distinct, concepts.