Informality as a methodological approach: crises, conflicts, governance, and the everyday

Palazzo du Mesnil e Sala Cavalcanti - - - 9:00
Immagine
Informality as a methodological approach: crises, conflicts, governance, and the everyday

Informality studies are thriving. From political informality to economic approaches to international relations (Polese 2023) to the study of the everyday and crisis situation (Helou and Polese 2024), the number of works engaging with an “informality framework” are growing exponentially.

With this workshop, we want to address two main issues. Theoretically, we seek to put order in the study of informality, inform a taxonomy of informality and explore, in particular, categories linked to everyday governance of crises, risk management and, starting from the idea that informality can be regarded as a form of resistance (Murru and Polese 2020), forms of political activism from contentious politics and unorganized resistance up to informality as a form of insurgence (Hanau-Santini and Polese 2017, Polese and Hanau Santini 2017). Whilst doing this, we want to back up our theoretical understanding of informality through solid case studies, robust data collected in a variety of situations (we are open to any cases and data as long as they can advance the understanding of informality) and their interpretation.

By doing this, we advocate for at least two major roles of informality. One is a key concept to understand theory and practice of governance. Interventions and policymaking are not what they are conceived but what they become after they have passed through practical issues. Accordingly, it is virtually impossible to carry out an intervention and successfully bring some behavioural change if informal mechanisms, power relations and dynamics are not taken into account. We welcome papers engaging with theory and practice of intervention taking into account not only the official but also the unofficial, including informal institutions, informal leaders and informal practices in a development context. Second is informality as a methodology for |the study of the invisible” (Pawlusz and Polese 2017). Indeed, the study of official discourses, policies and macro-tendencies of a country often fail to take into account the “infrapolitics” (Scott 2012) dimension suggesting that an apparently insignificant action, repeated millions of times, by actors possibly unaware of one another, can eventually cancel a political measure, contrast a top-government decision or simply put it at stale. We wish to encourage the study of invisible, uncoordinated and apparently insignificant actions (and signals) that eventually play a major role in the political, economic and social life of a state and its society.

Data di ultimo aggiornamento: 30 Gennaio 2025