Creative Interventions in Global Politics – serie

Contemporary articulations of dissent to social order and its production of truth cannot be ignored any longer. Hamburg during the G20 gathering; Washington, D.C., on the day of Trump’s inauguration; the squares and streets of Paris and Tunis at the end of 2018. Public space is temporarily taken by those who rise against the powers that keep structural oppression and social order in its place. Not only riots, but collective social centres, protest camps and temporary as well as permanent occupations of lands and buildings are other, utopian spatial alternatives created by autonomous social movements to prefigure a horizontal social organization. This book discusses spatial practices of autonomous social movements, the movements who ‘see their everyday experiences and creations as the revolution they are making’, together with these movements and in taking the diversity of their articulations into account. Sites of Dissent is thus the story of a daring attempt to create research practices for radical transformation which requires a radical transformation of research practices. During this attempt, methodological rules of scientific research are broken, and methodological heresy and wild experimentation with research practices take place.Sites of Dissent aims at opening new possibilities of including diverse ways of knowing and speaking into a collective knowledge creation process, at overcoming the individualized isolation in which the researcher produces knowledge about the outside world; and it aims to create a space for collective learning about spatial practices of autonomous social movements, to learn with and from the movements.

What can creative methods offer our understanding of military power and militarised cultures? What constitutes ‘creative research’ in military studies? And, what are some of the challenges of this type of work? This edited volume brings together authors working at the cutting edge of creative research in military studies, to explore how creativity and creative practice can shed new light on often taken for granted concepts in critical military research. In twelve empirically and conceptually rich chapters, authors from a diverse range of disciplinary fields draw on theatre, model-making, songwriting, dance, spoken word, paper making, and more, to question what military research can and should look like. As a collection, the book explores topics of central concern in military studies such as militarism, military experience, and militarised cultures, as well as more practical questions around ethics, positionality, and research relationships. This path-breaking new volume considers what exactly constitutes creativity in critical military research, while offering the tools for researchers to think anew about big questions in the field.

The Lived International is a poetic account of Stephen Chan’s personal engagement in International Relations. It speaks to the inadequacy of an abstract voyeurism while the problems of the world are death, devastation and underdevelopment. Drawn from a lifetime of travel and engagement, and from both published and hitherto unpublished poetry, forming a parallel list to the author’s academic works, the book seeks to inject into debate the sense that language, spoken and written discourse alone, are not a sufficient claim to ‘bearing witness’, and that even activism from afar can often fail to understand a human condition that afflicts the majority of the world’s population. Chan demonstrates that a life of praxis, living international relations, yields more insights than a life of theory alone.

The Lived International is a poetic account of Stephen Chan’s personal engagement in International Relations. It speaks to the inadequacy of an abstract voyeurism while the problems of the world are death, devastation and underdevelopment. Drawn from a lifetime of travel and engagement, and from both published and hitherto unpublished poetry, forming a parallel list to the author’s academic works, the book seeks to inject into debate the sense that language, spoken and written discourse alone, are not a sufficient claim to ‘bearing witness’, and that even activism from afar can often fail to understand a human condition that afflicts the majority of the world’s population. Chan demonstrates that a life of praxis, living international relations, yields more insights than a life of theory alone.

Tears of Theory demonstrates the value of making storytelling and personal experience integral parts of International Relations (IR) scholarship. Through an examination of the disappearance of Korean Air (KAL) flight 858 in 1987, the book also explores what it means to conduct research in sensitive and difficult settings. According to South Korea, a female secret agent bombed the plane under instructions from the North Korean leadership, killing 115 people. Many unanswered questions emerged and resulted in two rounds of reinvestigations. Taking this case in the context of the ongoing Cold War, Park-Kang presents the story about a researcher, whose life is deeply entangled with the Cold War mystery. The story is based on the author’s dramatic research journey of twenty years on the mysterious spy. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of IR, Asian/Korean Studies, Narrative Studies, Security Studies, Pedagogy and methodology.

What is the role of politics in the classroom? How does the desire of the teacher shape the pedagogical process? Is teaching possible? Is learning possible? Pedagogy as Encounter engages with such larger issues. The majority of discussions, workshops, conference panels, articles, and books avoid meta-pedagogical issues by focusing on technique. Such “technique talk” examines schemes, methods, and procedures that do and do not work in the classroom. It answers the “how” question at the cost of ignoring these bigger queries. Pedagogy as Encounter consists of 120 vignettes arranged in eight chapters. Most of these are first person autobiographical stories that describe encounters with students and colleagues. They portray a teacher whose classroom disappointments lead him to radical experimentation. But there are also a few theoretical sections, as well as segments that are epigrammatic in nature. All of it is grounded in a Lacanian political psychology and in a critical global political economy. The theory, however, remains largely implicit and is confined to the footnotes. The body of the text is free of jargon and presented in a conversational voice.

What is the role of politics in the classroom? How does the desire of the teacher shape the pedagogical process? Is teaching possible? Is learning possible? Pedagogy as Encounter engages with such larger issues. The majority of discussions, workshops, conference panels, articles, and books avoid meta-pedagogical issues by focusing on technique. Such “technique talk” examines schemes, methods, and procedures that do and do not work in the classroom. It answers the “how” question at the cost of ignoring these bigger queries. Pedagogy as Encounter consists of 120 vignettes arranged in eight chapters. Most of these are first person autobiographical stories that describe encounters with students and colleagues. They portray a teacher whose classroom disappointments lead him to radical experimentation. But there are also a few theoretical sections, as well as segments that are epigrammatic in nature. All of it is grounded in a Lacanian political psychology and in a critical global political economy. The theory, however, remains largely implicit and is confined to the footnotes. The body of the text is free of jargon and presented in a conversational voice.

Tears of Theory demonstrates the value of making storytelling and personal experience integral parts of International Relations (IR) scholarship. Through an examination of the disappearance of Korean Air (KAL) flight 858 in 1987, the book also explores what it means to conduct research in sensitive and difficult settings. According to South Korea, a female secret agent bombed the plane under instructions from the North Korean leadership, killing 115 people. Many unanswered questions emerged and resulted in two rounds of reinvestigations. Taking this case in the context of the ongoing Cold War, Park-Kang presents the story about a researcher, whose life is deeply entangled with the Cold War mystery. The story is based on the author’s dramatic research journey of twenty years on the mysterious spy. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of IR, Asian/Korean Studies, Narrative Studies, Security Studies, Pedagogy and methodology.

This open access book is an autoethnographic reflection on the value in the act of writing, illuminating the life of the researcher—in particular the researcher as human. Shepherd explores the multitudes of the academic, feminist self through expanding vocabularies of how scholars, researchers, writers, teachers, and academics can make sense of their worlds.At the intersection of international relations theory and the personal, Shepherd presents seven reflexive essays on aspects of being and knowing as she has encountered them. The essays are grounded in and inspired by her experiences as a way of asking readers to imagine how knowledge production in the social sciences might look different if we could create and hold space for different ways of writing, being, and knowing. The disciplining practices which produce our limited modes of academic expression can be encountered otherwise. She calls on us to reflect on academic subjectification across the interconnected spaces we simultaneously inhabit and produce.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by University of Sydney

This open access book is an autoethnographic reflection on the value in the act of writing, illuminating the life of the researcher—in particular the researcher as human. Shepherd explores the multitudes of the academic, feminist self through expanding vocabularies of how scholars, researchers, writers, teachers, and academics can make sense of their worlds.At the intersection of international relations theory and the personal, Shepherd presents seven reflexive essays on aspects of being and knowing as she has encountered them. The essays are grounded in and inspired by her experiences as a way of asking readers to imagine how knowledge production in the social sciences might look different if we could create and hold space for different ways of writing, being, and knowing. The disciplining practices which produce our limited modes of academic expression can be encountered otherwise. She calls on us to reflect on academic subjectification across the interconnected spaces we simultaneously inhabit and produce.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by University of Sydney

This book presents a collective mediation on writing, methods, violences, and un/becomings in global politics. It combines narratives, fictional stories, academic discussions, passionate unwindings, imagined futures, and more. The editor's intention is to offer a theoretically creative work which engages extensively with the visual and affective to un-discipline knowledge and modes of expression. The book’s point of departure is a conventional academic conference and its peculiar academic concerns (which many readers will only be too familiar with), using this to open up to broader and deeper concerns about everyday-level decisions, realities, and perspectives that feed into and make global politics. It is a polyvocal text that collects traces of thinking, learning, conversing, embodying and ‘finding out’, in an attempt to make visible some of the avalanches of discarded knowing practices. In this sense, this book is a methods book as much as a political/theoretical text that demands we (better) understand or know the worlds we enter, inhabit, to make it quiver otherwise.

This book presents a collective mediation on writing, methods, violences, and un/becomings in global politics. It combines narratives, fictional stories, academic discussions, passionate unwindings, imagined futures, and more. The editor's intention is to offer a theoretically creative work which engages extensively with the visual and affective to un-discipline knowledge and modes of expression. The book’s point of departure is a conventional academic conference and its peculiar academic concerns (which many readers will only be too familiar with), using this to open up to broader and deeper concerns about everyday-level decisions, realities, and perspectives that feed into and make global politics. It is a polyvocal text that collects traces of thinking, learning, conversing, embodying and ‘finding out’, in an attempt to make visible some of the avalanches of discarded knowing practices. In this sense, this book is a methods book as much as a political/theoretical text that demands we (better) understand or know the worlds we enter, inhabit, to make it quiver otherwise.

Writing is a central part of the life of a scholar-academic. The writing that makes it into public spaces, however, is but a glimpse of the writing we do and might find meaningful. This edited volume is an attempt to collect writing that often remains hidden in academia – the email exchange with a student or colleagues, the writing that grapples with our loneliness, rage, and failures – and yet provide crucial insight into the ugly realities of global politics and the work that gets done on it (or not) in the neoliberal, extractive university.

Writing is a central part of the life of a scholar-academic. The writing that makes it into public spaces, however, is but a glimpse of the writing we do and might find meaningful. This edited volume is an attempt to collect writing that often remains hidden in academia – the email exchange with a student or colleagues, the writing that grapples with our loneliness, rage, and failures – and yet provide crucial insight into the ugly realities of global politics and the work that gets done on it (or not) in the neoliberal, extractive university.

Kavya is an Indian-American professor and single mother struggling with debilitating panic attacks. Bombarded by flashbacks of cruelty and violence that disrupt her everyday life, she is left with no choice but to confront the intergenerational trauma tormenting her. At first, Kavya finds some relief in piecing together the legacies of her family’s experiences with colonialism, colorism, and casteism. But just as she starts to recover, explosive confessions threaten to bring her world crashing down.Tilt is an unflinching feminist novel about the devastating histories that haunt us and the unexpected beauty of facing our pasts.

Kavya is an Indian-American professor and single mother struggling with debilitating panic attacks. Bombarded by flashbacks of cruelty and violence that disrupt her everyday life, she is left with no choice but to confront the intergenerational trauma tormenting her. At first, Kavya finds some relief in piecing together the legacies of her family’s experiences with colonialism, colorism, and casteism. But just as she starts to recover, explosive confessions threaten to bring her world crashing down.Tilt is an unflinching feminist novel about the devastating histories that haunt us and the unexpected beauty of facing our pasts.

Contemporary articulations of dissent to social order and its production of truth cannot be ignored any longer. Hamburg during the G20 gathering; Washington, D.C., on the day of Trump’s inauguration; the squares and streets of Paris and Tunis at the end of 2018. Public space is temporarily taken by those who rise against the powers that keep structural oppression and social order in its place. Not only riots, but collective social centres, protest camps and temporary as well as permanent occupations of lands and buildings are other, utopian spatial alternatives created by autonomous social movements to prefigure a horizontal social organization. This book discusses spatial practices of autonomous social movements, the movements who ‘see their everyday experiences and creations as the revolution they are making’, together with these movements and in taking the diversity of their articulations into account. Sites of Dissent is thus the story of a daring attempt to create research practices for radical transformation which requires a radical transformation of research practices. During this attempt, methodological rules of scientific research are broken, and methodological heresy and wild experimentation with research practices take place.Sites of Dissent aims at opening new possibilities of including diverse ways of knowing and speaking into a collective knowledge creation process, at overcoming the individualized isolation in which the researcher produces knowledge about the outside world; and it aims to create a space for collective learning about spatial practices of autonomous social movements, to learn with and from the movements.

What can art offer to facilitate a fuller understanding of human rights and human rights violations? How do arts-based interventions help to highlight injustices, empower individuals and groups, and advocate for and effect change? How do art practices help to reveal new dimensions of violations and aid in post-conflict recovery? In this edited volume, twenty-seven artists and scholars, working across a range of practices and approaches, answer these questions – and many more – through a series of conversations. They offer deeply personal reflections on creative labour, sharing original and rich insights into a range of ongoing social and political struggles, violent conflicts, and human rights abuses.

What can art offer to facilitate a fuller understanding of human rights and human rights violations? How do arts-based interventions help to highlight injustices, empower individuals and groups, and advocate for and effect change? How do art practices help to reveal new dimensions of violations and aid in post-conflict recovery? In this edited volume, twenty-seven artists and scholars, working across a range of practices and approaches, answer these questions – and many more – through a series of conversations. They offer deeply personal reflections on creative labour, sharing original and rich insights into a range of ongoing social and political struggles, violent conflicts, and human rights abuses.

This book tells the true story of a young girl growing up during the Kosovo war and its immediate aftermath following Kosovo’s liberation by NATO troops in 1999. Through her embodied experiences, the book exposes the tangible and everyday acts and events of the war, providing brutal insight into the impact of war and the politics of subjugation.At the outset of the book (in 1998), Vjosa’s view of the world, as a young child, is organized in clear dichotomies: the good Albanians and the evil Serbs; the brutal Serbian military shelling Albanian civilians and the angelic NATO airplanes bombing Serbian military sites. This Manichean worldview starts to unravel after Vjosa and her family are chased away from their home by the Serbian military and moved to the suburbs. There, surrounded by mostly poor and uneducated fellow Albanians, she gradually discovers the layers of her family’s socio-economic privileges. Though unequipped with the language to verbalize it, she is tormented by the idea that her family’s comparatively higher socio-economic status is the reason why they are spared by the Serbian military. When the war ends in 1999, and the NATO tanks fill the narrow streets of her hometown as Serbian military tanks leave, Vjosa believes she received her own ‘happily ever after’. She celebrates her thirteenth birthday happily wearing a US military uniform, holding an unbearably heavy unloaded gun as she becomes the favorite interpreter of the American NATO troops. She spends several months after the war occasionally translating between angry Albanians who now seek revenge against Serbs and NATO troops who insist on not picking sides; showcasing the impossibility of (re)building Kosovo with “both-sides-ism” becoming the modus operandi of the international intervening structures.