Description
This paper builds on the figure of ‘the Stranger’ in IR that has predominantly been understood as a form of otherness capturing ambiguity as a threat to modern conceptions of (collective) identity, that political actors try to discipline and turn into something familiar. Building on scholarship that rejects ontologies based on difference as the drive for equivalence/closure/certainty, we present a different reading of strangeness that shows its creative and, thereby, productive nature. We leave behind the concern with politics of (in)security and, instead, move from the analytical category of the stranger to a concept of ‘strange encounters’ as academic practice.
Looking at the field of IR, we focus on how strangeness does important work in the process of knowledge production, by reading strange encounters in the field in social (strange relationship) and phenomenological (strange experience) terms through three layers: the spatial, the temporal, and the normative. We discuss examples of scholarship crossing boundaries, taking risks, and breaking with established conventions, to advance an ethos that recognises the creative potential found in making the familiar strange. The paper ends with a call to foster and consciously embrace a set of attitudes and practices that enable for strange encounters to happen and to be productive.
