Erzsebet Strausz

Drawing out resonances across art-based practice and critical imaginations in the discipline, this paper maps out conceptual, creative and experiential resources for re-rooting International Relations for the climate and the needs of the more-than-human world. I trace what I describe as ecologically attuned ways of knowing along two main inspirations: L. H. M. Ling’s Imagining World Politics and the 7000 HUMANS participatory initiative designed by Shelley Sacks. Writing with a rhizomatic sensibility and foregrounding ways of knowing that may emerge in and through encounters with trees, I explore imaginative possibilities for transforming epistemological disconnection from vegetal life into embodied, integrative, life-enhancing modes of relating to both ourselves and the more-than-human world.

The Strangers Project in New York City invites ‘strangers’ to stop by and handwrite their story. Over 65,000 anonymous stories that capture a fragment of someone’s life have been collected and displayed on site and online in the past fourteen years. Drawing on Adriana Cavarero’s notion of the ‘narratable self’, Walter Benjamin’s figure of the ‘storyteller’, and other philosophical inspirations, this chapter engages various aspects of this ongoing experiential and experimental project with regards to how relationships to selfhood, otherness, and one’s own life story may be negotiated in writing and reading, as well as by navigating an expanding archive of autobiographical memory. Following Cavarero, the transformational potential of storytelling lies in offering the other a narration that speaks to what they may see and experience as fundamentally incomplete in their own quest for identity as ‘unity’. In dialogue with the founder of the project, I aim to uncover some of the complex ethical and aesthetic processes that lie within what it might mean to domesticate strange(r)ness and estrangement both within and outside oneself through the performative practices of writing, reading, and communal sharing. In this effort I pay special attention to the pictorial aspects of handwritten life stories—that is, the ‘second story’ that emerges from the marks and traces left on the page—as gateways to sensing and making sense beyond our habitual (academic) modalities.

This paper offers a series of (auto)ethnographic reflections on COVID-19 and the ways it changes how we, as educators, practice, perform and inhabit the spaces of higher education. Using a phenomenological framework based on the concept of atmosphere, which constitutes an embodied relation in space, we explore pedagogical relations in our felt university classrooms and lectures theatres. We focus our shared attention on the unexpected and unplanned political possibilities and emotional opportunities that arise from teaching in (post) COVID atmospheres. Thinking atmospherically about pedagogy shows how the dislocating pandemic may open onto a felt politics of disruption and transgression.

This article engages questions of authority and authorship in the discipline and the IR classroom, driven by a search for affirmative horizons within critical scholarship and academic practice. Prompted by a series of 'failures' attached to the social and disciplinary performance of 'expertise' in the context of violent conflict, I explore the practice of writing as it unfolds from Michel Foucault's lesser cited essays and interviews as a generative, creative resource. I follow Foucault in breaking down the normalised perceptions of the 'author function,' revealing writing as an act that diagnoses, discovers, and potentially transforms writer, reader and the social structures that the writing addresses. Foucault's experimental ethos brings to light the complex life worlds of sense-making through the vehicle of writing. It also invites us to embrace the transgenerational heritage that quietly structures our relationships to knowledge together with the multiple selves that arise and are co-present in the text. I enter such processes of negotiation and transgression in Foucault's work and my own writing through a series of vignettes, which aim to actualise the 'method' these gestures may harbour for making 'uncommon sense' and re-inhabiting research and pedagogical practice as continuous, selfreflexive and self-authori(zi)ng journeys.

As I was preparing for my first fully online course in September, I remember distinctly that feeling of uncertainty, even anxiety, emanating from the fact that whoever would end up sharing the online space that I was planning, creating, crafting in that moment, would not have met each other in person. None of the students had met either their peers, or me, their instructor, face-to-face, and we all knew that it would stay like that for the entire term. We would hear each other’s voices and see images of faces and upper bodies distorted by different intensities of light, framed by doors, pets, plants and accidental visitors. This was different to the switch to online teaching as an emergency measure that happened earlier in the Spring. After several weeks of ‘conventional’ in person exchanges, what had been built collectively and personally until that time – perceptions, habits, a modus operandi that comes with some element of trust – came to a test in a new setting; yet there was something there to be tested and probed into, and as such, to rely on. That subtle, invisible band of information that wraps around bodies and composes experiences as people move in and out of physical spaces was not going to be there this time. The affective, emotive hinges that we sense and make sense of, through which we work situations out and ‘get’ things and people, or at least the seeming naturalness of these unconscious mechanisms when bodies are co-present, would be limited. The intangible yet very much present trails of thoughts, feelings, and actions that belong to a person and carry their information, energy and ‘beingness’ within a limited distance, almost palpably, as a silent, unuttered, unconscious ‘hello’ to others, creating momentary exposures to the infinite complexity of another world, would not be accessible. ‘Everyone will arrive in their own cocoon’ – I thought to myself – ‘and will remain there, at least for some time, if not for the whole course. What is my role as a teacher here?’ Somewhat more poignantly, this question begs another, more fundamental one: what would be my role otherwise? I have been thinking with and along Jacques Rancière’s figure of ‘the ignorant schoolmaster’ (1991) for several years now. I had come to the temporary conclusion that my main task is not to explain, let alone, alluding to Freire, ‘deposit’ knowledge or information in anyone’s head (Freire 2000, 72). There are several lines that I formulated for myself to actualise this sentiment for my own teaching practice, one of which sounded like this: ‘I want to affirm to my students that they are capable of figuring things out for themselves’. That is, I just need to find a way to help them turn inwards so that they can tap into the infinite power of their own minds and learn how to work with it, how to own it with openness and curiosity. ‘I will just hang around as a “vanishing mediator”, and listen to accounts of how “sense” had been made. I will be there to prompt, provoke, instigate reflection, and “verify” the work of “attention” (Rancière 1991, 31–33). And then, I will step back and allow the rest of the process to be taken care of in everyone’s own paradigm, to be integrated into their learning journeys in their own unique ways’. Then, my job – I thought – would be pretty much done.

Since 2015 healthcare professionals have been made responsible for noticing signs of radicalisation and reporting patients to the Prevent programme. This chapter unpacks the aesthetics and pedagogy of the Home Office training DVD called WRAP 3 (Workshop to Raise Awareness of Prevent) that creates constant awareness to what is perceived as pre-terrorist trajectories of thought and behaviour. Yet, thinking with Foucault and Rancière and considering how other critiques of Prevent succeeded in driving it further into the realms of government secrecy, we reflect on our ethical commitments and the lived experience of research: what is critique and what can critique do?

In order to elucidate some of the ways in which critique and subjectivity become inextricably linked in Foucault’s oeuvre, the paper proceeds first by briefly discussing the concept of critique as limit-attitude as it appears in some of Foucault’s methodological writings. Subsequently, the main tenets of Judith Butler’s commentary on the essay ‘What is Critique?’ will be summarized, concentrating on

What are the demands of critical pedagogy at the conjunctions of neoliberal government and International Relations scholarship? Working with the classroom as a distinguished site of order-making, social critique and transformation – an interface between world, knowledge, and self – this chapter makes an ethical, political and poetic inquiry into the processes and possibilities of inhabiting disciplinary practice and the spaces of the modern university otherwise. Through narrative writing and storytelling it experiments with a slower mode of sense-making and ways of (un)learning that may challenge how teaching and research are habitually performed and experienced in academic everyday life and beyond. By re-centering pedagogy as a fundamental mode of knowing, relating and being-together, it offers insights and maps new openings in how taking pedagogical relations seriously can inform and present alternative, more democratic frames of seeing and doing in both IR and the world it studies.

This book emerges from within the everyday knowledge practices of International Relations (IR) scholarship and explores the potential of experimental writing as an alternative source of 'knowledge' and political imagination within the modern university and the contemporary structures of neoliberal government. It unlocks and foregrounds the power of writing as a site of resistance and a vehicle of transformation that is fundamentally grounded in reflexivity, self-crafting and an ethos of care. In an attempt to cultivate new sensibilities to habitual academic practice the project re-appropriates the skill of writing for envisioning and enacting what it might mean to be working in the discipline of IR and inhabiting the usual spaces and scenes of academic life differently. The practice of experimental writing that intuitively unfolds and develops in the book makes an important methodological intervention into conventional social scientific inquiry both regarding the politics of writing and knowledge production as well as the role and position of the researcher. The formal innovations of the book include the actualization and creative remaking of the Foucaultian genre of the 'experience book,' which seeks to challenge scholarly routine and offers new experiences and modes of perception as to what it might mean to 'know' and to be a 'knowing subject' in our times. The book will be of interest to researchers engaged in critical and creative research methods (particularly narrative writing, autobiography, storytelling, experimental and transformational research), Foucault studies and philosophy, as well as critical approaches to contemporary government and studies of resistance.