20–23 Jun 2023
Europe/London timezone

The Art of War: Discovering Discomfort/Discomforting Discoveries

23 Jun 2023, 09:00

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Abstract: This paper advances a scholarship of discomfort as an innovative CMS approach to interrogate the art of war. Building on research examining US military/veteran artwork of post-9/11 controversial wars, it explores how discomfort – in relation to aesthetics and affect – can provide more textured representations of war and its experiences. Not only tracing the aesthetic, affective and discomforting within this art, this approach embraces aesthetics, affect and discomfort as methodologies. Retaining an openness that accounts for messiness and unease, it pursues lines of thinking that fall outside comfort areas regarding the subjects/objects ‘under examination’, its (re)thinking of IR/CMS/interdisciplinary scholarship, and its creative undertaking/presentation of research. It involves thinking through how discomfort can be a method – not only are the sites of research (and) encounter discomforting (by forging connections with military/veteran artists in terms of what they conducted/carry/create), but how we do this work on/with/in those sites is also discomforting – in challenging us as researchers to reclaim military-veteran research as careful, critical, creative encounters; in how creative work can re-present differently the ‘stuff’, re-place sanitised stories of the military, militarism and war; in how such work’s sense of incompleteness – despite traditional approaches’ insistence on easy, fixed conclusions – is a strength. Art and creative practice offer a discomforting incompleteness where multiple possibilities are reimagined. By examining military/veteran artwork through aesthetics, affect and discomfort, this approach offers destabilising conceptual, theoretical, and methodological insights for IR into war, security, and (non-)military/militarised bodies and experiences.

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