Description
Although the discipline of International Relations has incorporated transdisciplinary critique of humanist ontologies into its theoretical vocabulary, new materialist and posthumanist ontologies tend to be approached only as new tools for interpreting world politics rather than as socio-political imaginaries calling for a reconsideration of a research practice. Thus, human-centered methods of data collection such as interviews and participant observation remain primary for scholars doing fieldwork. This paper highlights the need for addressing this gap by providing an account of the author’s encounters with vegetation as "actants" in a memorial park to the Second World War in Saint Petersburg. To map out the affective intensities produced in vegetation’s participation in state-led militaristic memorial rituals, practices of mourning and negligent recreational activities, I introduce a practice of herbarium assembly as a performative method of data collection. Appearing in the black and white space of a conference paper, the leaves, petals, and crumbles collected at the park function as both a material, bodily archive of vegetation’s uses in competing memorial projects and as a non-representational cartography that highlights life and death as the everyday present of “memory” rather than the distant past it commemorates. By conceptualizing and performing herbarium collection as a creative method for studying the politics of non-human life, the paper contributes to studies of memorial vegetation, new materialist understandings of agency and performative methodology in IR.
