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Paper short abstract

This paper explores a politics of translation as a lens through which to understand coalescing crises and the rise of variegated authoritarianisms, addressing some of the philosophical, moral-ethical and political implications.

Paper long abstract

This paper addresses the importance of a politics of translation for understanding coalescing crises and the rise of variegated authoritarianisms, situating reconstituted racialized hierarchies, patriarchal and heteronormative ideologies, and forms of class oppression across spatio-temporal assemblages. A politics of translation illuminates a policy world in which forces of displacement and dislocation unfold through continuous transformation, negotiation and enactment. We aim to capture translation in terms of making “new associations, to reassociate or perhaps reassign” (Freeman, 2004). Thinking about reassociation and reassignments emerged at a time when the straightjackets of dominant policy models - revealed in our own work on development projects and on the Europeanization of social policies in new EU member states – alongside the depoliticization of governing, rendered a seemingly ever-expanding techno-legal policy space actually smaller in terms of the room for manoeuvre and the possibility of alternatives. With the rise of authoritarian governing, deglobalisation, radical uncertainty, and the profound crisis and fragmentation of technocratic and legal registers of policy worlds, we address some of the philosophical, moral-ethical and political implications of taking translation seriously as a central concept in the anthropology of policy and beyond. Our aim is to broaden understandings of what might constitute an anthropology of policy by bringing it closer to work that may well not address policy centrally or, even, at all and, indeed, work not even considered to be anthropological in terms of its disciplinary provenance. We explore, in turn, translation itself, relationality, conjunctural thinking, history, racialised coloniality, silences and policy otherwise.