EISA Standing Section Doing IPS
Doing IPS has a Standing Section at the Pan-European Conferences of the European International Studies Association since 2020.
Convenors
Jef Huysmans (Queen Mary University of London)
Renata Summa (University of Groningen)
Standing Section Doing IPS
This section aims at offering a space in EISA conferences and activities for the engagement with agendas of research that gravitate around IPS as a site of critical explorations of the ‘problem of the international’. In the past fifteen years international political sociology sought to expand critical investigations at the intersection of different disciplinary fields in the social sciences in a move to expand and diversify scholarship in IR.
The efforts to continuously push the limits of this intellectual movement, IPS has produced a variety of initiatives – institutional and academic – along different spaces – associations, universities, networks, publications – that have, for the most part, contributed to consolidate its transdisciplinary and transversal agenda, connecting scholars and researchers who share a disposition to transgress institutionalized repertoires of analysis and displace questions, methods and styles considered acceptable in the field.
Following the exploration of the in-between, the contingent and the multiple in world politics that defines IPS, the section will stimulate debates that further its innovative research programme focusing on the importance of boundary traversing phenomena in world politics and on dynamics of fracturing social and political orders.
International Relations as a social science creates analytical dispositions that pull research into saying something about planetary, global, world, or international order and history. Despite an intensified interest in the situated, the everyday, the event, and the local in international political sociology, gaining IR credentials still often requires that these little or momentary analyses have something to say about big orders, transformations and world histories. International political sociology is a site of exploring concepts and approaches that problematises these pulls towards the ‘big’. It does so by inviting conceptual and methodological inventing that challenges sociologies of order and explores sociologies of transversal connecting.
The standing section will promote topics that have populated IPS’ research programme such as migration and other forms of human and non-human circulation and mobility, surveillance, resistance, citizenship, post-truth, temporalities and histories, technologies of government, and so forth. We will also continue to encourage theoretical and empirical work around concepts such as movement, becoming, critique, practice, atmospheres, affects, the everyday, borders, coloniality, inequality and the planetary.
IPS has been a constant feature in EISA conferences. As a field it is clearly identified with the displacement of the disciplinary centrality of International Relations from the US to a more global and considerably more European oriented intellectual orientation. The section is committed to diversity and inclusion of scholarship as well as to supporting scholarship that continues lineages of critical thought in IR and beyond.
