Lecture
Legitimation as political practice: everyday authority in Tanzania and beyond
- Kathy Dodworth
- Date
- Thursday 25 May 2023
- Time
- Location
- Pieter de la Courtgebouw
Wassenaarseweg 52
2333 AK Leiden - Room
- 5.A29
This event will be held physically in Leiden. For registrees who cannot travel to Leiden a link to an online platform will be sent one day before the start of the event.
Legitimacy has long been perceived through a Westernised lens as a fixed, binary state. In this lecture, Kathy Dodworth offers an exploration of everyday legitimation practices in coastal Tanzania, which challenges this understanding within postcolonial contexts. She reveals how non-government organisations craft their authority to act, working with, against and through the state, and what these practices tell us about contemporary legitimation. Synthesising ethnographic fieldwork with theoretical innovations from across the social sciences, legitimacy is reworked not as a fixed state but as a collection of constantly renegotiated practices. Critically adopting insights from political theory, sociology and anthropology, she builds a picture of contemporary governance in Tanzania and beyond in the wake of waning Western dominance.
About the speaker
Kathy Dodworth is a Research Fellow at the Centre of African Studies at The University of Edinburgh, currently examining voluntary labour in Kenya. Her recent book 'Legitimation as Political Practice: Crafting Everyday Authority in Tanzania' is a result of her doctoral research in Politics and International Relations also at Edinburgh in 2018, which won the School of Social and Political Science Outstanding Thesis Award. The book has been deemed 'ground-breaking' (Rita Abrahamsen, University of Ottowa; Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, University of Bayreuth) with 'significant lessons for the theory and practice of global politics' (Carl Death, University of Manchester). She has published in African Affairs, Critical African Studies, Ethnography, Journal of Social Policy and Health.