Description
This paper begins to formulate what refusal to prevailing approaches to knowledge production in the academy might look like through the aesthetic and collaborative practice of curation. Creative production as method is still widely underexplored in the social sciences. In IR specifically, some scholarship has sought to rectify this, using film-making, novel writing and poetry as affective and creative processes to generate new insights into world politics. In extending this approach to leveraging creative production as a form of knowledge production, rather than knowledge dissemination, I consider the insights and limitations of utilising curation as method in theorising about the international. Throughout, I draw on an (anticolonial) surrealist approach which problemmatises the distinction between aesthetics and politics. In this paper, I reflect on auto-ethnographic observations of stepping into the role of the curator, through the curation of a contemporary art exhibition. Reflecting on this epistemological approach, I argue that curation can act as a new form of knowledge production for IR that is practice-based, embodied and collaborative. Here, I consider the extent to which this new way of knowing world politics can be conceived of as a form of epistemic refusal.
