Poetic International Relations: curiosity, creativity, care

What if IR took the poetic seriously? What would a poetic International Relations look, feel like? What could a poetic IR offer, un/re/make, un/do?  

In this webinar, Laura Mills (University of St Andrews) will explore what this can mean for the work we do as IR researchers and educators: what it means to embrace moments of discomfort while engaging in critical-creative-care-full (à la Motta) scholarship/pedagogy. The webinar will explore how poetry emerges/exists in the research encounter and seminar room. This does not (only) signify in literal poems, but in the being-knowing-doing we create there. That is poetry. Of course, not all teaching or research feels this way: we fail, this sometimes evades us – but there are multiple possibilities always for that to emerge.

Engaging in this work enables us in/through these multiplicities to encourage alternative ways of knowing global politics. This is not to advance this aesthetic approach as somehow an overriding, ‘better’ form of knowledge (production); rather, the ambiguity, discomfort, disorientation provoked by poetic inquiry leave an openness for multiple transgressive reimaginings of the political, the global.

The webinar will also feature Laura’s poetry and then enable participants to experiment in their own poetic practice if they wish.

Registration will close two hours before the event begins.