Karen Farquharson – (Dis)ability, Gender, and Cultural Diversity in Junior Sport

Karen Farquharson—(Dis)ability, Gender and Cultural Diversity in Junior Sport

I was working in collaboration with a colleague at the time. and we became really interested in this phenomenon that many political scientists are calling anti-politics. So, anti-politics doesn't mean that things are becoming less political as such, it just means that citizens are becoming more disillusioned and disaffected with the way that mainstream politics is being performed and practised. This takes many different forms. It can be the rise of populist parties as a reaction against mainstream politicians and politics. It can also be disaffection and disillusionment towards government in general and the institutions of government and those that surround it as well. So, we were quite interested in exploring that from a public policy / governance perspective because that's my main area, or subfield area of specialism. We focused instead on public servants and what their attitudes and perceptions were towards anti-politics. We were really interested in this question about politicians, in particular. So the political class. As a subset of these sorts of questions around anti-politics: one of the main sorts of issues is whether politicians or those in the political class - the disillusionment and disaffection that people feel towards politicians nowadays. I think people have always felt some sort of scepticism towards politicians and the political class in some ways and the question that political scientists are often asking now is whether that scepticism is starting to morph into a corrosive form of cynicism towards politicians. And if there is a corrosive form of cynicism is that starting to affect the way that we perceive of and understand democratic institutions, or whether we start to question whether democracy as a way in which we want to enact and perform decision-making within contemporary societies? So we were quite interested in looking at this question and asking this from the perspective of public servants, in particular. Public servants were really interesting and a focus of our study because they are the metaphorical fly on the wall, in many cases; they see politics as it's enacted. They see policy practices. They work in governments. So, from that very firsthand exposure of political processes, are they generally as cynical as the public, as well, about politicians or because of that firsthand exposure, do they show more empathy and understanding of the difficulties that might be involved in reaching consensus and agreement that's part of political processes and liberal democratic societies? What we wanted to do was not assume anything in the study. We wanted to look through a qualitative study and unpack in more detail what these public servants thought about politics in the first place. But t