Doing IPS Symposium
14 April 2023
Transversalising the social and political: writing time; making space.
This symposium explores practices of both space and time making and how they transversalise the political, social and international. IPS inherited the dominance of spatialising the social and political from IR and its concerns with drawing lines between insides and outsides, separating levels and thinking geographical politics. However, IPS has also been one of the scholarly sites for creating new concepts and methodologies that explore how space is not given but always made and in motion. And then, there is time. It is a bit a cliche to say that space and time are always combined. But what would it mean to give analytical and political primacy to time rather than space in IPS? The symposium explores current developments in space and time making in IPS. More specifically, it has two main aims:
to set up a debate on how modes of space making, and the spatial concepts and methods that are being used to analyse them, fracture positionality and identities in contemporary international politics;
to explore if giving primacy to temporalities leads to distinctive transversalising approaches in international politics and IPS.
This double aim is framed within the ongoing interest in IPS in fracturing familiar repertoires of analysis and practice and the value of understanding contemporary challenges in transversal terms.
The symposium also includes a closed session aimed at setting up a transatlantic writing support network between PhD students and early career researchers from Europe and Latin America.
The symposium follows on from the Winter School in International Political Sociology organised at PUC-Rio in July 2022. The Winter School combined introductions to IPS with mentoring sessions and seminars on creative writing, publishing, creating collaborations, and grant applications aimed at PhD students and early career researchers.
This event is funded by a British Academy Writing Workshop Grant (WW20200143), the LISS-DTP, and the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London.
Roundtable: Space-making
Space is often conceived as mundane, and studies overlook how space is created, organised or maintained. Without an interrogation into what this understanding does to our methods or analysis, space becomes a neutral category. In questioning what makes a space ‘ordinary’, ‘exceptional’ or ‘political’, this roundtable explores the economic flows, as well as the geopolitical and sociocultural entities of space-making. We seek to understand how space is conceptualised and shifts through different forms of knowledge and governance, or imaginaries. Giving primacy to these realities, we take space-making as a co-constitutive, ‘transnational practice’. We draw on a variety of contexts, including the home, the road and the community. Space, materiality and infrastructure are infiltrated by the stories, imaginations and relations within and around them, and tell their own narrative about dynamic experiences of power, mobility and politics. In line with a IPS commitment, this session fractures common analytical categories within IR, including inside/outside, belonging/not-belonging, local/international. Attending to the various conceptual dichotomies, which make space, the roundtable considers how space becomes (re)constructed or (re)shaped, with a particular focus on the international politics of domicide and urbicide. The roundtable will address the relationship between space (un)making and identity through the following questions. How do people engage with space? How do different ways of interacting affect alternative understandings of space-making? How do different understandings of space impact those entangled with the site? Can those same forces that produce space, unmake space, and what does this look like for the people and politics of space?
Roundtable: Time-making
The study of time and temporality has recently gained momentum within IR. Scholars, especially from the critical fringes of the discipline, have shown that while we do not know much about it, time informs IR practice and theory profoundly. As soon as it ceases to be conceived as a natural condition in the background of social life, time’s multiple, socio-political nature comes to the surface. Migration policies and related bordering practices often relegate migrants to unfamiliar and distant timespaces. Transnational surveillance networks and global financial flows epitomise not only a globalised, interconnected world, but also one supposedly dominated by speed and synchronicity. Climate change and other irreversible alterations of the environment have led to the advent of the Anthropocene: a new era that marks another re-orientation of the arrow of time. And yet, geopolitical thinking, lines drawing, inside/outside distinctions, and other spatialising practices and imaginaries are naturalised as the standard frame of reference in IR and IPS scholarly production. What if we foregrounded time? Which problems does time pose to international politics? Which solutions does it offer? Grappling with these questions, this roundtable asks what happens to research in IR and IPS and to international political practice when time and temporality are given primacy over naturalised spatial metaphors and practices, as well as space-dominated epistemologies.
Peer-Mentoring Session
This session of the symposium brings together Early Career Researchers from four of the nodal points in the DoingIPS network: Belgium, Brazil, the Netherlands, and the UK. Participants will be grouped based on research interests, themes, and affinities, and encouraged to pair up to support each other in writing for publications and grants in the form of ideas and drafts exchange(s). The pairing-up also encourages research collaborations more broadly – in the form of collective writing, co-organisation of panels and roundtables at international conferences, etc. The key aim of the session is to offer participants a platform to expand their research network transnationally, putting in touch like-minded individuals working on similar research areas. A few follow-up activities are planned for the remainder of the year to keep the momentum going.
Session Schedule
17:00-17:15 – Participants’ introductions
17:15-17:20 – Introduction to the session (Hannah Owens and Mirko Palestrino)
17:20-17:45 – Groupwork
17:45-18:00 – Wrap-up and outline of follow-up activities
Program
All events will be held at Queen Mary University of London (Graduate Centre, Room 201) and online
12:00 - 13:00 Light lunch
13:00 - 13:15 Introduction (by Jef Huysmans)
13:15 - 13:45 Keynote address (by João Nogueira)
13:45 - 14:00 Tea & Coffee Break
14:00 - 15:15 Roundtable on Space Making (with Angharad Closs Stephens, Lydia Cole, Hannah Owens, and Renata Summa, chaired by Meena Masood)
15:15 - 15:30 Tea & Coffee Break
15:30 - 16:45 Roundtable on Time Making (with Tasniem Anwar, Paulo Chamon, Mirko Palestrino, and Ritu Vij, chaired by Italo Brandimarte)
16:45 - 17:00 Tea & Coffee Break
17:00 - 18:00 Peer-Mentoring Scheme Session (Closed session - by invitation only)