Description
This paper elaborates on the radical role of care in contradicting the violent ways IR and the academy are and have been imagined. Specifically, I ask how and in what ways do IR academics mobilise care to resist and refuse the violent logics of academia, and crucially, how do these practices generate alternative possibilities for imagining the discipline and the academy otherwise? I ground my theoretical inquiry of care and its possibilities in the narratives of IR academics, drawn from in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted with scholars around the world. Drawing on these reflections, the paper aims to animate the ways care, as a practice of resistance, offers an avenue to understand how individuals survive and even thrive in circumstances of violence and vulnerability. This is not to deny or downplay the material effects of violence, rather I propose that there is something to be gained analytically if we take seriously these dimensions, specifically in relation to how we build and imagine radically alternative futures in the academy.
