Description
What if IR took the poetic seriously? What would a poetic International Relations look, feel like? What could a poetic IR offer, un/re/make, un/do?
The poetic is often reductively aligned with beauty or goodness, when of course poems unsettle, discomfort, challenge, leave uncertain in their ambiguity and ambivalence, voice – what Sianne Ngai terms – ugly feelings. The poetic can be discomforting; dangerous; disruptive. This manifests also in how we do this work as researchers, as educators: embracing moments of discomfort while engaging in critical-creative-care-full scholarship/pedagogy (Motta). I argue poetry emerges/exists in the research encounter and seminar room. This does not (only) signify in literal poems, but in the being-knowing-doing we create there. That is poetry. Of course, not all teaching or research feels this way: we fail, this sometimes evades us – but there are multiple possibilities always for that to emerge.
Engaging in this work enables us in/through these multiplicities to encourage alternative ways of knowing global politics. This is not to advance this aesthetic approach as somehow an overriding, ‘better’ form of knowledge (production); rather, the ambiguity, discomfort, disorientation provoked by poetic inquiry leave an openness for multiple transgressive reimaginings of the political, the global. Resisting comfortable/comforting conclusions, it unsettles disciplinary, epistemological, methodological frames of ‘normality’. Poetic IR enables us not only to “see ‘the data’ differently, producing new ways of thinking,” but to “become more responsible and accountable for the attempt to rupture and rearrange thought by openly crafting an aesthetics” (Hast 2020:7 via Leavy & Barad). As I have argued elsewhere, “aesthetics is politics but aesthetics is also ethics,” where creative work and the un/re-making of worlds it enables must always be understood as aesthetic-political-ethical process, must always be coupled with responsibility of/as research, to reveal a more textured global politics.
