Description
This paper advances a scholarship of discomfort as an innovative CMS approach. Building on research examining the Invictus Games and 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. Embracing aesthetics, affect and discomfort as methodologies, this approach retains an openness that accounts for messiness and unease and the politics they embody. While IS scholarship has already provided groundbreaking work on the methodological potency and possibility of affect and aesthetics, this emergent research agenda thinks through how discomfort can be a method. Not only are the sites of research (and) encounter discomforting (by forging connections with military/veteran athletes and 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 (re)thinking IS/CMS/interdisciplinary scholarship through the creative undertaking/presentation of research; in how such 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. Creative practice offers a discomforting incompleteness where multiple possibilities are reimagined. By examining the Invictus Games and 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.
