The Charles Taylor Book Award
Best Book in Political Science Employing or Developing Interpretive Methodologies & Methods
Freedom Inside? is a deeply careful and caring book, humanizing the lived experiences of those subject to the systemic injustices of mass incarceration. In this unique ethnographic study of yoga and meditation in U.S. prisons, Godrej asks whether yogic traditions as they are taught in prisons pacify the incarcerated to accept their lot or urge them to resist the penal system’s messaging. Embedding herself in volunteer organizations teaching yoga and meditation in prisons, with the rare access to the incarceration system that this entailed, Godrej arrives at a more surprising and complex answer than that suggested by the binary of political passivity versus resistance. She argues that yoga practices foster dignity and internal strength for practitioners behind bars, enabling them to “pursue forms of inward-oriented spiritual pursuit denied (or possibly unknown) to many people in society” (278). This insight is developed through close engagement with the voices and ideas of those who have experienced confinement and those who volunteer to teach them yoga, making Freedom Inside? a model of the co-production of knowledge between the author and interlocutors. Through an immersive, embodied, and consistently self-reflexive examination, this book makes profound contributions to our understanding of personhood in incarceration and internal dimensions of resistance, as well as to interpretive ethnographic methods. Freedom Inside? speaks to audiences beyond academia, demonstrating both the potential and the limits of self-care practices in “total institutions” of social control.
States of Subsistence is a journey that leaves the reader sensing the smell of khubz ‘arabi and pondering how the state is performed in Jordan and beyond. Through an ethnographic study of subsidized bread, Martínez pursues “the conundrums that come with being governed by something we can feel, hear, smell, and discuss, but never see” (5). He works at bakeries, interviews policymakers, and spends time with average citizens to understand how subsidized bread is entangled with weighty issues of state authority. Drawing on this long-term immersion, the book shifts attention from the institutions and events that have dominated the study of bread politics to the routines of food production and distribution as sensory rituals connecting citizens to the state. Taking bread and bakeries as an analytical vantage point, Martínez shows how political subjectivities are shaped through embodied relationships to the state, and how the state itself is “a set of relations and practices that must be constantly renewed” (12). States of Subsistence is a pertinent example of how systematic engagement with the ordinary can lead to unexpected yet profound insights, demystifying that most consequential abstraction in political thought and life—the state.
The IMM Group gives the Charles Taylor Book Award annually to recognize the best book in political science that employs or develops interpretive methodologies and methods. Award winning books distinguish themselves as contributions to interpretivist thought in one or more of the following ways. First, they treat knowledge, including scientific knowledge, as historically situated and enmeshed in relationships of power. Second, they approach the world as socially made so that the categories, presuppositions, and classifications that refer to particular phenomena are understood to me manufactured rather than natural. Third, they eschew the individualist orientation that characterizes rational choice and behaviorist research, instead addressing how ideas, beliefs, values, and preferences are always embedded in a social world, which is constituted through humans' linguistic, affective, and practical relations with others.
How to Nominate
Nominations for the 2024 Charles Taylor Book Award are currently closed.
Nominations are welcome from anyone. Authors may nominate their own work, as may readers and publishers. The nominated work may be either a single- or multi-authored book or an edited volume. To be eligible, books must have been published during the two-calendar-year period prior to the year of the APSA meeting, as determined by the printed book’s copyright date. A book that was nominated for the Charles Taylor Award during a year cannot be nominated again for the subsequent year’s Award. The award committee is under no obligation to make an award if submissions do not merit such recognition.
The Group will announce and present the Award at the annual APSA conference during its business meeting or reception.
