Roundtable: Transversality

Transversality. Beyond the international and global; but then what?

PLEASE NOTE THE CHANGE OF DATE FROM 9 TO 19 APRIL 2021

Organised by Joao P. Nogueira and Jef Huysmans for the Doing IPS Transnational Hub and the EISA Section Doing International Political Sociology.

When: Monday 19 April 2021, 14:00 London Time.

Where: Online event (Zoom).

Ever since its inception international political sociology has been defined by its distinct effort to articulate a critique of dogmatic conceptualizations of the international as a site of political life.  One of the key conceptual moves in IPS scholarship was its exploration of the multiple challenges to borders and boundaries.  Through this re-articulation of spaces it became possible to research the circulation of a plurality of flows, relations and connections previously subsumed by the gravitational force of sovereign lines.  IPS was uniquely successful in undoing the dominant representations of the international by thinking through the multiple emergence of fragments and analyzing how they produce heterogeneity and difference.  To do so it mobilized the concept of transversality both to examine processes beyond conventional topologies of scales as well as to open possibilities to observe the fracturing of the international in diagonal, interstitial spaces where bifurcations and disjunctions occur.  As IPS embraces the multiplicity of lines and connections in heterogenous spaces, the paradox of how the ‘various forms of transversal relations navigate their claims to novelty under the fairly established understandings of the social, the political and the international’ offers an interesting point of entry to engage with the concept of transversality.

The roundtable is part of a series in which we explore various concepts and approaches that have been deployed in IPS to escape recurrent territorializations we find ourselves falling into when trying to reimagine the boundaries and the beyond of the international and the global. This roundtable introduces a series of concepts of connecting that create heterogeneity, work disjunctively without centre, and open towards immanent conceptions of politics and the social.

Chair: Jef Huysmans (Queen Mary University of London)

Panelists:

• Didier Bigo (Sciences Po Paris; King’s College London)
  Centrifugal dynamics

• Angharad Closs Stephens (Swansea University)
  Affect

• Jonathan Austin (Graduate Institute of International Relations Geneva)
  Composing

• Linda Monsees (Ecole Normale Supérieure)
  Controversy

• Joao Nogueira (PUC-Rio)
  Folds

Photo by Tomás M on Unsplash.