Doing IPS at EISA in Sofia
Photo by Alvina Hoffmann
Doing IPS at EISA in Sofia
September 2019
Doing IPS organised a Section on ‘Doing International Political Sociology: fracturing concepts, transversal connecting’ at the Annual Pan-European Conference of the European International Studies Association in Sofia, Bulgaria, 11-14 September 2019.
The Section was a huge success with the initial five panels section needing to be expanded to eleven panels due to the overwhelming interest in IPS. The panels covered a wide range of IPS topics and approaches. The Section included a very lively roundtable on the relevance of thinking in terms of world order(ing) and histories and a panel on ‘Against order? Politics without the world’ that generated a huge interest. It was especially good to see how strongly IPS lives among doctoral students and early career scholars.
The Section description was as follows:
The section explores concepts and methods of international political sociology that challenge disciplinary imperatives of integrating fragments of life into world orders. International Relations as a social science creates analytical dispositions that pull research into saying something about planetary, global, world, or international orders and histories. 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 analyses have something to say about big orders, grand transformations and world histories. International political sociology is a site of exploring concepts and approaches that fracture these pulls towards the ‘big’. It does so by inviting conceptual and methodological inventing aimed at replacing sociologies of order with sociologies of transversal connecting. The contributions to this section develop concepts and methods for creating non-integrative understandings of connecting in contemporary politics with the express intention to dilute the disciplinary grip of world order and world historical thought on IR as a social science.
The full listing of the Section can be accessed here.
Photo by Alvina Hoffmann