Zacka and English awarded APSA's 2022 Kendra Koivu Award

September 8, 2022 MIT Department of Political Science

Please join the department in congratulating Political Science PhD student Jasmine English, and Class of 1943 Career Development Associate Professor of Political Science Bernardo Zacka, awarded the 2022 Kendra Koivu Award from the American Political Science Association (APSA) Qualitative and Multi-Method Research Section, for their paper "The Politics of Sight: Revisiting Timothy Pachirat’s Every Twelve Seconds.”

This award honors the scholarly legacy and contributions of Kendra Koivu, who published important works on process tracing, case selection, and other qualitative fields, and who provided valuable service to the section. English and Zacka will be presented their award at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association.

"The Politics of Sight: Revisiting Timothy Pachirat’s Every Twelve Seconds" abstract:
In his ethnography of industrialized slaughter, Every Twelve Seconds, Timothy Pachirat coins a label to describe political interventions that use visibility as a catalyst for reform—the “politics of sight.” English and Zacka argue that the politics of sight rests on three premises that are all mistaken or misspecified: (1) that exposing morally repugnant practices will make us see them, (2) that seeing such practices will stop us from acquiescing to them, and (3) that owning up to such practices is preferable to keeping them concealed. To develop their argument, they propose an alternative interpretation of Pachirat’s own ethnographic material informed by theories from social psychology—one that leads to a different critique of the politics of sight than the one Pachirat offers and to a different understanding of the conditions under which it can succeed. Methodologically, English and Zacka seek to illustrate the value of reanalyzing interpretive research through close reading.

You may read the full paper, which as been published in the American Political Science Review.