Upcoming Talks
Grounding the diasporic turn in political theory: Meta-commitment, transnationalism, and political obligation
Date: January 23, 2026
Time: 5 am Hong Kong Time (1/24) ; 3 pm Central Time; 4 pm Eastern Time; 1 pm Pacific Time
Speaker: Samuel Chan, Occidental College
Discussant: Kennedy Wong, The King’s University
Registration Required
Diasporas remain understudied in political theory. To ground a robust engagement with diasporas and their normative challenges, we expand on current transnationalism literature to offer a non-statist framework of political community. This framework is necessary as the diaspora is a transnational community that shares overlapping narratives and practices but lacks unified institutional structures and objectives. Tracking these features, we posit that individuals constitute a diasporic community by expressing, through their practices and narratives, a joint meta-commitment to act as part of that community. Meta-commitments do not require the parties to have substantial agreements beyond mutually recognizing each other as acting on behalf of the same community. The diasporic meta-commitment grounds an obligation of answerability: Diasporic members owe each other an answer as to how their choices relate to the future of the diaspora. This account contributes to transnational political theory by explaining the conditions under which transnational relations generate obligations.
Speaker
Kai Yui Samuel Chan is an Assistant Professor in Politics at Occidental College. Having earned his PhD from UC Berkeley in Political Science with a specialization in Political Theory, his research concerns individuals and communities traversing state borders. Samuel’s current book project, Entangled Peoplehood, re-interprets self-determination in light of the challenges confronting colonized, indigenous, and exiled peoples as they navigate an existing global order of nation states. His articles on diaspora, democratic theory, and interpretivism have been published by journals including American Journal of Political Science, Political Studies, and the European Journal of Political Theory.
Discussant
Kennedy Chi-pan Wong is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at The King’s University. His research focuses on diaspora organizing processes and the political polarizations that emerge in alliance formations. His current book project, Multipolar Politics, based on five years of global ethnography, examines how political fault lines and transnational repression shape the formation of alliances in the context of global migration and diaspora organizing. His work has appeared in American Behavioral Scientist and the Journal of International Migration and Integration. He has received several graduate student paper awards, including an Honorable Mention from the ASA Human Rights Section.
More to Come
To Be Announced.