Grounded normative theory focuses on enriching normative political theory arguments through recursive empirical engagement that strives for inclusiveness and accountability. It is increasingly influential but also has been critiqued as too broad to provide clear guidance. We argue that the approach, when understood as anchored in a complex conception of intellectual humility, can give crucial practical guidance, while also helping us to make sense of and evaluate ways of empirically informing normative theory. We demonstrate how different emphases on self-regarding and other-regarding intellectual humility guide research design, methods, and analysis in two main variants of grounded normative theory: theory testing and theory building. We show how specific normative-empirical projects can be situated and unpacked within the variants, and how each can give insights for project execution and assessment on empirical and normative criteria.

Many normative political theorists have engaged in the systematic collection and/or analysis of empirical data to inform the development of their arguments over the past several decades. Yet, the approach they employ has typically not been treated as a distinctive mode of theorizing. It has been mostly overlooked in surveys of normative political theory methods and methodologies, as well as by those critics who assert that political theory is too abstracted from actual political contestation. Our aim is to unearth this grounded normative theory (GNT) approach - to identify its definitive practices and highlight its potential significance. We detail four overlapping commitments characteristic of GNT. These include commitments to expanding the comprehensiveness of input for normative arguments through original empirical research and/or analysis, recursivity in the development of normative claims, attentiveness to the systematic inclusion of a range of voices and ways of knowing, and accountability to those engaged by the theorist in empirical contexts. We discuss methodological distinctions within GNT, including between more- and less-solidaristic approaches. We discuss how GNT answers calls for theorists to engage more closely with empirical political dynamics and we consider responses to possible critiques.

Abstract In Chapter 11, ‘Murmurations of Injustice: Dynamics of Structural Injustice and Epistemic Oppression’, Brooke Ackerly uses the metaphor of murmurations of starlings to describe structural injustice. This breathtaking natural phenomenon looks effortless but conceals complex relational responses within and between smaller groups of birds within the formation. Ackerly argues that, like a murmuration, structural injustice can be recognized without understanding its full complexity. That is, we have no outside vantage point from which to observe the structural injustices in which we live our lives. Ackerly argues that, if we want to address ‘injustice itself’ and not merely its consequences, then we need to try to change our internal relations. The first step in achieving this is to recognize that some epistemological accounts of injustice could in fact be oppressive. Instead of fixating on whether one account of injustice is right or wrong, Ackerly advocates focusing on the relational dynamics between them. Each approach provides insight into how structures of injustice might be changed. Ackerly argues that one strategy for addressing structural injustice is to resist the murmuration in its entirety, the other is to ‘influence, infiltrate, and transform’ it from within, and both approaches work in relation to each other. Ackerly concludes that we cannot settle on one understanding of structural injustice but rather accept the epistemological premis that our perception of structural injustice is dynamic, shifting in response to new information and interpretations, much like a murmuration.

Introduction: Low socioeconomic status has been linked to increased mortality. However, the impacts of poverty, alone or combined with health behaviors, on mortality and life expectancy have not been adequately investigated. Methods: Data from the Southern Community Cohort Study was used, including nearly 86,000 participants recruited during 2002-2009 - 2009 across 12 US southeastern states. Analysis was conducted from February 2022 to January 2023. Results: During a median follow-up of 12.1 years, 19,749 deaths were identified. fi ed. A strong dose-response relationship was found between household incomes and mortality, with a 3.3-fold (95%CI=3.1-3.6) - 3.6) increased all-cause mortality observed for individuals in the lowest income group (<$15,000/year) < $15,000/year) compared with those in the highest group (>=$50,000/year). >= $50,000/year). Within each income group, mortality monotonically increased with declining healthy lifestyle score. Risk was signifi- fi- cantly lower among those in the lowest income but healthiest lifestyle group, compared to those with the highest income but unhealthiest lifestyle (HR=0.82, 95%CI=0.69-0.97). - 0.97). Poor White participants appeared to experience higher all-cause mortality than poor Black participants. Life expectancy was more than 10.0 years shorter for those in the lowest income group compared with those in the highest income group. Conclusions: Poverty is strongly associated with increased risk of death, but the risks could be modestly abated by a healthier lifestyle. These fi ndings call for a comprehensive strategy for enhancing a healthy lifestyle and improving income equality to reduce death risks, particularly among those experiencing health disparities due to poverty.

ABSTRACT In Poverty, Solidarity, and Poor-Led Social Movements, Monique Deveaux builds a political theory of poverty as relational and responsibility for injustice as solidaristic. Identifying the ways that poor-led movements have politically theorized and acted, Deveaux develops a theory of relational poverty that entails politicizing poverty which requires local-level organizing, consciousness-raising, resisting injustice and developing and demanding alternatives, and engaging in public debate and discourse. She goes on to argue that the praxis of poor-led movements reveals normative commitments to mutuality, deference and deep listening, and risk taking. These enable movements of people in poverty to take on the injustice of poverty together across difference, privilege, and other obstacles to transformative (solidaristic) politics. Deveaux provides a mode for doing grounded normative theory (GNT) by relying on secondary literature. GNT is a methodology for doing political theory that destabilizes the epistemological authority of the political theory of the academy by treating lived experience – words and actions – as providing relevant text for analysis. The methodology is particularly important for theories related to justice. Deveaux demonstrates how this can be done with secondary sources thus enabling comprehensive engagement without avoiding burdening social movement actors with interviews or other modes of accommodating researchers.

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Decolonial and Indigenous Climate Studies’ Contributions to Climate History and Humanities for a Planetary Age - Dipesh Chakrabarty: The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. Pp. 296.) - Volume 84 Issue 4

This chapter provides a grounded normative theory of global responsibility. Recognizing the cognitive and other limitations to understanding the scope, dynamics, and complexity of global injustice, the chapter argues that the basis for responsibility for injustice is not in conventional moral and legal notions of duty, but rather in political notions of human rights. The chapter distinguishes between rights as entitlement and rights as enjoyment in order to discuss how these two notions give rise to different kinds of struggle over responsibility and human rights. Ultimately, the chapter concludes, when making arguments for the political, social, and economic transformations necessary to take on the structural aspects of injustice, the enjoyment approach to human rights is a better partner.

This article demonstrates the import of feminist reflexivity for the decolonial project. At its best, the decolonial project reveals the form and extent to which contemporary ideas and power structures are imbued with generations of power structures whose foundations were laid during colonialism. However, some power dynamics can be lost in reified forms of decolonial critique. Feminist methodologies, especially reflexivity, remind us to revisit the particulars of the constructions of power within dominant power structures and, as importantly, within resistant power structures. We revisit the decolonial stance within an Indigenous cosmology, Aymaridad, ‘the’ Aymara worldview as constructed for the second largest Indigenous population in Bolivia. Aymaridad is an important site for feminists to revisit the relationship between feminism and decoloniality because over a decade ago, María Lugones charted a course for decolonial feminism that drew on an Aymaran approach to decolonizing gender. By revisiting the coloniality embedded in the construction of Aymara (in academe and in politics), we reveal that feminism’s persistent reflexive methodology, even more than its attention to gender specifically, makes it an essential part of the decolonial theory.

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An editorial is presented about the challenges that the world is facing in the face of Covid-19 Pandemic which brought diseases, economic recession, and long-term uncertainty. It discusses marginalized groups and those marginalized within groups bearing more of the consequences of these upheavals and feminists raising awareness of the ways in which caste, gender, race, disability, sexuality, and colonial and neocolonial oppressions have been exacerbated.

Feminist work, and that of International Feminist Journal of Politics authors in particular, seeks to go beyond the dynamics of “visible” exclusions, marginalizations, and oppressions. As feminist ...

As we face the grim global statistics of 1.5 million deaths and more than 65 million cases and second or even third waves happening in many countries, the news of effective COVID-19 vaccines shines...

30/07/22 12:03 PM GS_30_1-2_15_Ackerly.indd Page 197 30/07/22 12:03 PM the good society, vol. 30, nos. 1–2, 2021 Copyright © 2022 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA doi: 10.5325/goodsociety.30.1–2.0197 What a rich and complex book has brought together these commentators. Sungmoon Kim’s Democracy After Virtue is grounded in contemporary politics and yet challenges us to imagine democratic possibilities for East Asian societies with long Confucian histories, contemporary Confucian practices, and heterogeneous commitments to Confucian virtues. For any of us, imagining the meaning and potential meaning of “Confucian democracy” is easier if we recognize that we have never seen an actual “liberal democracy” either. If you are willing to see democratically endorsed oppression of freedom and obstacles to equal participation of a majority or a minority within a country and still call the government that authorizes these a “liberal democracy,” then you are ready to play the “what is Confucian democracy?” game. However, if you want to come up with a Confucian democracy that functions outside of your imagination, then you also need to consider the contemporary circumstances of politics, national and international. Sungmoon Kim begins and ends his theoretical search for Confucian democracy with these circumstances. This is the approach to Confucian democracy that has been one of the defining features of Kim’s scholarship throughout his career. The other has been careful, rigorous treatment of serious political philosophers, revealing for us in their work both strength and opportunity (for improvement). In his scholarship he has always been a generous and critical interlocutor whose work he engages is flattered by the engagement despite Sungmoon Kim’s Democracy After Virtue

This piece introduces a symposium on Luis Cabrera’s The Humble Cosmopolitan (Oxford University Press, 2020), which is a comparative political theory text in three senses. First, it expands conventional conversation partners to include authors who are engaged in constructing their nation out of a colonial context, principally, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar is a scholar, politician, Chairman of the Constitutional Drafting Committee for the newly independent India, and Dalit activist (“Dalit” being the self-applied term for those outside of the Hindu caste hierarchy) and Madhavrao Sadashivrao Golwalkar, the historical thought leader of Hindu nationalism. Second, Cabrera reaches across the colonized-colonizer divide, engaging with intra-nation difference, enabling cross-time comparisons, broadening the moral and political meanings of, contributions to, and criticisms of cosmopolitan thinking. Third, using grounded normative theory, it is methodologically comparative, utilizing the author’s own empirical research through over 150 interviews of activists and politicians from both Indian and European cosmopolitan and anti-cosmopolitan struggles.

By understanding populism as an “anti-” politics we can see two strands of populism: the anti -democratic strand which marginalizes certain groups of people and the anti-structural injustice strand coming from marginalized people. The potential of this anti-structural injustice activism encourages activists to expand their coalitional politics and government and philanthropic donors to see the import of funding and otherwise supporting work against structural injustice that explicitly takes on patriarchy and racism, among the full gamut of ideologies based on hierarchy and injustice.