This book develops an approach to both method and the socio-political implications of knowledge production that embraces our embeddedness in the world that we study. It seeks to enact the transformative potentials inherent in this relationship in how it engages readers. It presents a creative survey of some of the newest developments in critical research methods and critical pedagogy that together go beyond the aims of knowledge transfer that often structure our practices. Each contribution takes on a different shape, tone and orientation, and discusses a critical method or approach, teasing out the ways in which it can also work as a transformative practice. While the presentation of different methods is both rigorously practice-based and specific, contributors also offer reflections on the stakes of critical engagement and how it may play an important role in expanding and subverting existing regimes of intelligibility. Contributions variously address the following key questions:
What makes your research method important? How can others work with it?
How has research through this method and/or the way you ended up deploying it transformed you and/or your practice?
How did it matter for thinking about community, (academic) collaboration, and sharing knowledge?
This volume makes the case for re-politicizing the importance of research and the transformative potentials of research methods not only in accessing the world as an object of study, but as ways of acting and being in the world. It will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, critical theory, research methods and politics in general.
prelude three locations studying in world politics / a reading guide
Erzsébet Strausz, Shine Choi and Anna Selmeczi In(ter)ferences this book you
are holding Anna Selmeczi, Erzsébet Strausz, Shine Choi breathe Ephemeral
language: communicating by breath Marijn Nieuwenhuis re-tell Untraining
critique and the power of performance Catherine Charrett Connecting with
Others The labor of political theatre as embodied politics: A conversation
Richa Nagar and Anna Selmeczi Para-citations: fragments on the law and lore
of genre Sam Okoth Opondo feel (the edges) Beyond a classroom: Experiments in
a post-border praxis for the future Koni Benson and Asher Gamadze
Anticolonial intimacies: How I learned to stop worrying about IR and start
teaching politics Himadeep Muppidi A presence (m)otherwise Sara Motta
Teaching about sexual violence in war Kimberly Hutchings Self-contact the
basis of presence Nicholas Janni cut Decolonizing visual ethnography: A
transdisciplinary intervention Rohan Kalyan The drone cut-up project Trevor
McCrisken and Erzsébet Strausz with images and film by Ben Cook Pull Toy
re-form An exercise in questions and conversation: Does creativity need to be
evaluated? Shine Choi and Debbie Lisle Trying not to write an academic book
(while at the same time trying to write one) Marysia Zalewski How do you make
yourself a chapter without organization? Phil Gaydon, Conor Heaney, Hollie
Mackenzie, and Iain MacKenzie support The practice of queer method in
International Relations Cynthia Weber interviewed by Anna Selmeczi and
Erzsébet Strausz Colouring LEP The politics of images: a pluralist
methodological framework Roland Bleiker Collage as an empowering art-based
feminist method for IR Saara Sarma trans-script editing collage
shine choi teaches Politics and International Relations at Massey University. She is also Associate Editor of International Feminist Journal of Politics and Co-editor of the book series, Creative Interventions in Global Politics with Rowman & Littlefield.
Anna Selmeczi is Lecturer and Programme Convener of the Masters in Southern Urbanism at the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town.
Erzsébet Strausz is Assistant Professor in the Department of International Relations at Central European University, Hungary.