Description
For the last two years, my colleagues and I have been visiting military museums, exhibitions, remembrance ceremonies and war-related performances across Scotland as part of the Carnegie Trust research project, ‘War Commemoration, Military Culture and Identity Politics in Scotland’ (2017-18). As with many empirical research, this project led to a journey of personal discovery of new spaces and practices of society-military interactions through culture. This journey was challenging and very emotional, problematising our ability to conduct ‘emotional fieldwork’ (Cree 2017; Baker et al 2016), and engage in affective engagements in the working of Scottish/British everyday militarism. In this intervention, we would like to reflect on affective engagements with military-hosted theatrical performances as a means to investigate the nexus between creative research methods in military studies, and creativity and the ‘efficacy of art’ (Ranciere 2015). Based on Ranciere’s vision, I problematise what constitute ‘creative’ and ‘efficient’ practices of doing art and conducting critical military research. We argue that although Ranciere’s approach allows bringing sense and sense-making to the fore of the analysis, it obscures an ability of art to work towards both consensus and dissensus. We argue that the exploration of collisions of these logics from the perspective of Feminist IR can open up a route towards productive conversation between performers, soldiers, theatre-goers, and critical military researchers. In this paper, we focus on a single play, InValid Voices by Helen-Marie O’Malley from the 2018 Army@Fringe programme which was advertised as a piece that ‘offers insights into life as part of a forces family and the experience of Commonwealth soldiers’ through the recollection of autobiographical accounts of women’s experiences who served as soldiers or were married to Commonwealth soldiers from the infantry battalions of the Royal Regiment of Scotland which deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan during the GWoT (Army@Fringe 2018). For us, the experience of immersing ourselves in this play, interviewing artists, observing responses of the public and artists, and discussing this play with theatre critics (mostly negative reviews) problematized difficult questions such as: what can be seen as a creative and effective piece of art work, and what is our positionality a researchers in this process. We believe that in exploring these questions, we can productively disrupt and challenge the workings of the militarised multiculture (Ware 2012) and truly make the voices of Commonwealth soldiers, military wives and family members heard, seen and acknowledged.
