Mapping practices and spatiality in IR knowledge production: from detachment to emancipation

This article conceptualises the variety of approaches taken by International Relations (IR) scholars around the world to dominant forms of knowledge production in IR. In doing so, it advances Global IR debates along two axes: on practices and on spatiality. We argue that binary conceptions are unhelpful and that engagement with knowledge production practices is best captured by a landscape of complexity, requiring a deeper interrogation of positionality, globality and context. Using 26 qualitative interviews with IR academics at institutions in East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, Eurasia and Africa, we construct a typology comprising seven modes of engagement that capture the conflicted relationships to dominant forms and practices of knowledge production in IR. The typology is intended to highlight the variation, complexity and contextual particularities in global IR knowledge production practices and to enable an interrogation of spatial hierarchies that unsettle conventional geopolitical West/non-West fault-lines.

Conspicuous Consumption: economies of virtue and the commodification of Indigeneity

Our work examines the complexities and paradoxes of decolonization and Indigenization, including multiple understandings, conflicting aspirations, contradictory desires, institutional instrumentalizations, heterogeneity within and between Indigenous communities and enduring limitations of efforts in this area. We start this article with an overview of the work of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures arts/research/ecology collective and the “Towards Braiding” mode of inquiry, which provide the context for our work. Next, we use this mode of inquiry to present three scenarios that illustrate how Indigeneity is consumed in non-Indigenous institutions. We conclude the article with a reflection about the difficult path towards non-consumptive modes of engagement with Indigenous peoples grounded on relations rooted in trust, respect, reciprocity, consent and accountabilityi and where difficult conversations can happen without relations falling apart.

Rethinking Bach

If Johann Sebastian Bach has loomed extra-large in the imagination of scholars, performers, and audiences since the late nineteenth century, this volume sets out to provocatively reshape that imagination from a multitude of present-day perspectives, both from within and outside of traditional Bach studies. The essays gathered here reconsider Bach’s musical practices from the vantage points of material culture, voice, embodiment, affect theory, and systematic theology; they challenge fundamental assumptions about the nineteenth-century Bach revival, about the rise of the modern work concept, about Bach’s music as a code, and about editions of his music as monuments; and they reimagine Bach as humorist, as post/colonial export, as pedagogue, as anti-modernist, and as uneasy postmodern icon. Collectively, these contributions thus take apart, scrutinize, dust off, and reassemble some of our most cherished narratives and deeply held beliefs about Bach and his music. In doing so, they open up multiple pathways toward exciting future modes of engagement with the composer and his legacy.

After Vanity Metrics

‘Vanity metrics,’ as they are critically termed, measure the performative work an individual carries out on social media. Posting on social media and subsequently displaying and maintaining like, view, and follow counts have been critiqued as both distracting modes of engagement as well as performance in a ‘success theater’. The notion of vanity metrics additionally implies how one may consider reworking the metrics. In an undertaking he calls ‘critical analytics’, the author proposes an alternative metrics project akin to altmetrics in science but utilized instead to measure actor activity around social issues and causes in social media. Critical analytics are means to analyse dominant voice, concern, commitment, positioning, and alignment of actors using social media to work on social issues and causes, seeking to contribute a conceptual and applied research agenda to orient the study of social media use and activity metrics.

Antropologias, artes e política: engajamentos e encontros

Este artigo explora as modalidades de engajamento que a disciplina antropológica tem vindo experimentar, e em particular, seguindo um percurso pessoal da minha atividade como antropólogo e cidadão, procura dar conta da produção de um certo tipo de antropologia pública. Tomo como ponto de partida a perceção de que todo o conhecimento é, para além de situado, político, uma vez que a produção ou o enquadramento do conhecimento tem sempre efeitos políticos. Para ilustrar esse debate proponho partilhar as estratégias e os itinerários utilizados na realização de três encontros internacionais que buscaram cruzamentos entre arte, antropologia e ativismo e que visavam conjugar tanto artistas quanto pesquisadores, num pano de fundo ligado a uma cidadania engajada. Palavras-chave: Antropologia Pública. Arte. Ativismo. Antropologia engajada. Anthropologies, arts and politics: engagements and encounters Abstract: This article explores the modes of engagement of anthropology that anthropology has been experiencing, and in particular, following a personal journey of my activity as an anthropologist and citizen, seeks to account for the production of a certain type of public anthropology. I take as my starting point the perception that all knowledge is political, besides being situated, since the production or framing of knowledge always has political effects. To illustrate this debate, I propose to share the strategies and itineraries used in the realization of three international meetings that sought intersections between art, anthropology and activism and that aimed to conjugate both artists and researchers, in a backdrop linked to an engaged citizenship.Keywords: Public Anthropology. Art. Activism. Engaged Anthropology.

Alcohol and the Identity-Building Experience: The Biographical Interview

Within the framework of this paper, the author examines individual drinking "strategies" and their relationship with the social context. To accomplish this task, the author turns to the concept of ‘modes of engagement’ by Laurent Thévenot. On the base of an in-depth interview, the author identifies three stages of alcohol consumption that the informant went through: 1) adolescence, which can be described as a "game", the essence of which boils down to hiding the fact of drinking alcohol from the parents; 2) the student period (life in a dormitory), when the strategy of consumption can be described as the ‘discovery mode’ according to Thévenot, a distinctive feature of which is the search for something new; 3) the present (living alone), which is characterized by a non-reflective routine use of alcohol. Such a strategy is brought in accordance with Thévenot’s "mode of intimacy", which is characterized by an increase in the importance of an object (in this case, alcohol); however, at the same time, the actor loses the opportunity to reflect on his relationship with the object, due to the fact that it becomes a part of his “unquestioned” everyday life. The article also examines the models of conceptualization of alcohol and alcoholism, used by the informant herself.

Stacked Fields of Criminal Justice: The National Embeddedness of Transnational Policing

This article investigates how transnational policing is structured by the embeddedness of participating police units in national fields of criminal justice. Empirically, the analysis zooms in on the embeddedness and positionality of three different Danish police units that frequently engage in transnational cooperation. Positioned differently in the national field of criminal justice, these units have distinct capacities with regard to mobilizing and deploying material and symbolic resources and, consequently, have distinct modes of engagement with transnational policing. Conceptually expanding this insight to capture the structure of transnational policing more generally, this article develops the concept of “stacked fields” to capture how transnational cooperation and power relations are formatted by the national, institutional, and positional embeddedness of participating police units and agents.

Varieties of Deliberation: Framing Plurality in Political CSR

This article argues that the concept of deliberation is construed too narrowly in political corporate social responsibility (CSR) and that a concept of deliberation for political CSR should err toward useful speech acts rather than reciprocity and charity. It draws from the political philosophy, labor relations, and business ethics literatures to outline a framework for an extended notion of deliberative engagement. The characters of deliberative behavior and deliberative environment are held to generate four modes of engagement: strategic deliberation, unitarist deliberation, pluralist deliberation, and deliberative activism. The article concludes by arguing that political CSR will be better positioned to realize its potential by moving away from primarily consensus-centered objectives to a more responsive range of deliberative goals and practice.

Virginia Woolf, Filmmaker

This chapter considers the afterlives of Virginia Woolf, beginning with a general overview and then turning to Woolf’s legacy in film. Whereas a few filmmakers have attempted to adapt Woolf’s works with varying degrees of success, a handful of twenty-first-century filmmakers have moved towards alternative modes of engagement beyond adaptation. Mark Cousins, François Ozon, David Lowery, and Alex Garland, this chapter suggests, have embraced Woolf as an experimental filmmaker, as one of them. Her writing helps focalize the explorations of identity, loss, and survival in What Is This Film Called Love? (2012), Under the Sand (2000), A Ghost Story (2017), and Annihilation (2018). No longer are Woolf’s biography, her body, or even particular works at the forefront of her legacy; this chapter argues that in this eclectic group of films, Woolf and her writing are not only vaporized and reconfigured but also, problematically, domesticated and neutered.

Community cityscape: modes of engagement and co-construction of the streetscape

This contribution explores the bottom-up processes via which a community – or indeed special interest groups within a community – can influence the semiotic choices in the street-scape around them. I start by discussing the question to which extent the decision-making processes about street naming in different locales are transparent and open to public involvement. I also explore the instruments used by city councils and other administrative agencies to invite or indeed stifle public debate about street names, such as citizens surveys, op-eds in local newspapers and discussion fora as opposed to closed-off systems and exclusionary strategies. The paper moves on to consider grassroots movements opposing top-down decisions, including the mobilization of guerilla activity resulting in semi-spontaneous re-naming of street names and polls/lists of names and letters sent to the city council by concerned citizens. Finally, I consider politically motivated acts of vandalism resulting in semiotic erasure as well as resistance to official naming via inertia. The article closes with a brief discussion of the increasing commercialization of the linguistic streetscape, exploring the impact of market forces which claim authorship of the city text.