Description
The examination of silence as a site of agency is an emerging practice in feminist international politics research. Parpart and Parashar (2019) contend that alongside negative articulations of silence, silence can be mobilised as an instrument to evade violence or exercise power. Hansen (2019) theorises silence as paradoxical and non-binary to move beyond the reductive dichotomy ‘speech’ versus ‘silence’. Responding to the conference theme ‘ways of knowing’ international relations, this panel takes a feminist and interdisciplinary approach to challenge dominant knowledge production within critical and qualitative studies examining relations between the international and the local that privilege voice and speech (Parpart and Parashar, 2019). We are particularly interested in papers that explore how silences are used as strategies of power and resistance; discuss theoretical and methodological approaches to researching silence in relation to gendered security and insecurities, international politics, conflict and post-conflict settings, and the creative tensions that emerge during the embodied research encounter.
