Call for papers - Living together with fragments: Methods, themes, and theories
Living together with fragments: Methods, themes, and theories: Critical Alternatives for World Politics Working Group call for papers and panels for the BISA Conference 30 June-2 July 2027 in Manchester.
The main conference theme for 2027 speaks of fragmenting orders. Building on this, we take a related but alternative starting point of fragments. The Critical Alternatives for World Politics (CAWP) working group aims to offer a space for creative and critical engagements with fragments (and ideas of fragments), how they come apart, and are reassembled, patched, collaged, and brought together. This theme allows us firstly to consider fragments as a series of questions: who or what is fragmented within International Studies and why? It also allows us to consider what it means for us to live in fragments, and how we move past fragmentation in new and interesting ways. This is an open call for you to interpret the idea of fragments in ways that are meaningful to you as International Studies scholars, to allow us to push the boundaries of the discipline. This means that we are open to papers on fragments that focus on empirical, methodological or theoretical issues, and more.
The CAWP working group - now in its second year - invites papers and sessions on experimental, creative, and non-mainstream research and researchers at the margins of International Studies. In particular, the working group seeks to encourage submissions which are transdisciplinary and, crucially, draw on sub-disciplines, discussions and approaches that are less common within International Studies. As part of this, we also encourage applications which expand the approaches to research presentations through, for instance, the use of audio-visual materials.
We welcome submissions on a wide-range of topics, including but not limited to:
- the aesthetics of fragments
- fragments and global power
- resistance and fragments
- secrecy, ignorance and the politics of fragments
- affective labours of fragmentation
- critical ontologies and epistemologies of fragments
- hands-on methods workshops focusing on fragments.
The deadline for submissions is 6 November 2026. To submit your proposal, please visit https://conference.bisa.ac.uk/. If you have any questions, get in touch at cawp.group@bisa.ac.uk.