1st Edition
Critical Methods for the Study of World Politics Creativity and Transformation
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
Biography
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.