Description
A common narrative in aesthetic studies within International Relations often paints art as a kind of ‘weapon of the weak’. What might be the political possibilities at stake if we think beyond both art and resistance as the primary sites of aesthetic and oppositional engagement with the world? How might such a shift elicit new insights into the potentialities of aesthetic sites, methods, and conceptualisations? To navigate these questions and the possibilities they open, this panel will offer ‘refusal’, as an alternative mode of aesthetic engagement with the world. Here, refusal is the total rejection of structures that resistant politics aim to defy. Oppressed, colonised, marginalised, and disciplined subjects from around the world, both historically and contemporaneously, have engaged and are still engaging with embodied, affective, tactile, and material means of aesthetic refusal in order to stage their disavowal and rejection of what subjects and subjectifies them.These practices of refusal often have gone beyond the high-political and conventional sites of artistic production and have involved and incorporated creative, everyday, and unconventional practices of aesthetic intervention.
In this panel, we will consider: the political possibilities beyond relation through an engagement with Dark IR, elemental geographies and aesthetic subjects in urban place-making in the Middle East and North Africa, methodological refusal to conventional knowledge production in the academy through curation, anarchic and anti-capitalist refusal in forrest occupation and the limits of memetic refusal in relation to Eating the Rich. In doing so, we explore the radical potentialities and limitations that refusal, and its manifestations, might offer for the study of world politics.
