Mie Inouye

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Mie Inouye is a political theorist whose research interests include democratic theory, critical theory, qualitative research methods, inductive political theory, social movements, religion and politics and the organizing tradition in 20th- and 21st-century American politics. Her dissertation theorizes movement politics as a distinctive democratic tradition whose theory of democratic participation diverges from aggregative, deliberative and participatory democratic theories. Drawing on original ethnographic research, ritual theory and theories of conversion, she describes the forms of participation that sustain movement politics, including embodied participation and organizing discourse. She identifies points of tension between these participative forms and prevailing democratic theories, and uses the former as the basis for a theory of democratic participation as a process of individual and social transformation.