Description
This panel explores how different stories about the ‘international’ can be narrated by centring marginal feminist scholarship and working from marginal Global South geographies that are seldom seen as epistemic beyond their empirical circumstance. This panel builds on existing transnational feminist and gender studies that has interrogated how we tell stories about the ‘international’, asking what epistemic, political, ethical commitments are required to tell stories differently; what different relationalities emerge in praxis; and how might such theorising re-envision alternative ways of imagining and inhabiting the world. The papers frame alternative world-makings and struggles as simultaneously epistemic and political that can begin to offer different stories about the ‘international’ beyond macropolitical structures like the state, nation, borders. They reframe and reorient critical international relations thinking to interrogate and challenge power in its mutative and shape-shifting forms – an imperative both feminist and decolonial in form and practice. The papers also raise urgent ethical and methodological questions around resisting methodological nationalisms, addressing discomfort, engaging with different textural archives and lived experiences as a way of breathing life into theory. By showcasing work by early career scholars, the panel responds to how feminist theorising from the margins can challenge conventional IR.
