Michael Hanchard

CAREER AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS / STATEMENT OF VIEWS

Michael Hanchard is professor of political science and director of the Institute for Diaspora Studies at Northwestern University, where he formerly chaired the Department of African-American Studies. He is a comparativist who has done field work in Brazil, Britain, Cuba, Colombia, Ghana, Italy, and Jamaica, and he has held grants from Ford, MacArthur, NEH, and Mellon. His books include Orpheus and Power: Afro-Brazilian Social Movements in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, the first study of black social movements in contemporary Brazil in any language, and recently listed in Brazil as one of the top ten books by foreign researchers on the topic of racism in Brazil; Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil (editor and contributor), a volume devoted to racism, inequality, black social movements and democracy in Brazil. Party/Politics: Topics in Black Political Thought (2005, Oxford University Press) is devoted to understanding black political phenomena in relation to recent literatures and debates in political science and several other disciplines about power, identity and political mobilization. As a teacher, his graduate and undergraduate courses cover topics of nationalism, social theory, comparative racial politics, black political thought, Latin American politics, the African diaspora, and qualitative research methods.

The Perestroika movement in U.S. political science encompasses a variety of political and methodological tendencies that are not always in agreement. I have no interest in joining a new guild within the discipline that accepts distinctions between "hard" and "soft" research methods, or in crusading against another's seemingly heretical definition of the political, whether quantitative or qualitative. Although I have no objection to the use of mathematical models, I remain convinced that ethnographic and historical methods, coupled with analytic approaches from social and political theory, are vital in helping scholars to grasp many types of political phenomena. My participation on the APSA Council would be informed by one of the premises of my teaching and scholarship: politics is constituted by acts of imagination, community and will, as well as by rational choices and deliberation.