Description
This roundtable brings together IR scholars from different geographic and academic backgrounds to discuss their use of the notion of ‘home’. Starting from the observation that ‘home’ is an undertheorized notion in IR due to the legacy of the inside/outside ontology of traditional IR. The discussion here aims at (re)establishing ‘home’ in International Relations as an epistemology; as a way to question legitimacy, authority and rights in world politics; as a lens through which to critically examine home as a place of safety and violence, e.g. in migration, war and the construction of gender hierarchies; and to think about how metaphors, narratives and experiences of ‘home’ shape the stories we tell about world politics. These four broad themes are explored through insights from research in indigenous, gender, critical border, post/de-colonial and sociological research experiences. We conclude that more research is needed in theorizing ‘home’ as epistemology and methodology, but also as a site of constructing, maintaining, cultivating, and, also, destroying social relations that make up the world as ‘we’ know it.
