Disrupting Political Science: Black Women Reimagining the Discipline by Angela K Lewis-Maddox

Newly minted political science Ph.D.'s are likely not assigned to read Merze Tate (Ph.D. Government, Harvard University, 1941), Jewel Limar Prestage (Ph.D. Political Science, University of Iowa, 1954), or Mae Coates King (Ph.D. Political Science, University of Idaho, 1968). Burgeoning practitioners further lack an appreciation of their leadership to building and sustaining the discipline's institutional arms whether by receiving international fellowships (Fulbright, as in the case of Tate), founding professional organizations (National Conference of Black Political Scientists, in the case of Prestage), or staffing them (American Political Science Association, in the case of King). Disrupting Political Science: Black Women Reimagining the Discipline compiles sixteen interventions explaining how Black women's contributions to the field continue to go “unnoticed,” ensuring that emerging scholars are privy to their collective labor. The authors identify Black women in political science with a variety of transformative phrases: “good trouble-makers” (Alexander-Floyd), “space-invaders” (Lewis-Maddox), “rhythm-disruptors” (Melonas), “joy-cultivators” (Nwakanma), “risk-takers” (Willoughby-Herard et al.), and “paradigm-shifters” (Hossein). These descriptors are further amplified through the book's central method—autoethnography, an approach that seeks to describe and systematically analyze personal experience to understand cultural experience. With segments included in What Political Science Can Learn from the Humanities edited by R.A.W. Rhodes and Susan Hodgett (2021) and the Encyclopedia of Critical Political Science edited by Clyde W. Barrow (2024), this approach appears relatively new to the field; however, the contributors to Disrupting Political Science keenly show its importance for vulnerable participants like Black women in reclaiming their agency, rest, and mirth while coping with “being an outsider within” (Bonnette-Bailey), constantly having to “prove that they matter” (Jordan-Zachery), carrying high service loads (Peterson), mitigating harassment (Austin), or a combination thereof. Methodologically, it also makes room for a foundational critique of the discipline's origins that continues to haunt its venues for scholarly distribution: “John W. Burgess considered the founder of political science . . . viewed Blacks as an inferior race and saw slavery as a positive institution. The first political science journal, Political Science Quarterly, helped perpetuate this view, as Burgess served as an editor” (4).