Description
International Relations (IR) finds itself constantly experiencing ‘turns’ within and around its disciplinary boundaries, and it has even been suggested that IR has thus far failed in the fundamental task of defining its own discipline. With such a disciplinary dilemma in mind, it is important to consider where IR fits into the wider research landscape, and how it relates to other disciplines within said landscape. Interdisciplinarity links to potential future directions for IR as a discipline, and it is therefore useful to identify where interdisciplinary work is taking place amongst Post-Graduate Researchers (PGRs), as the next generation of researchers within IR, considering new ways to harness and nurture the interdisciplinary value of their work. This paper reflects on the activities of a ESRC Research Catalyst Fund project exploring PGR perspectives on the future of IR as a discipline, via a variety of PGR-led events.
Through the activities of the project were able to highlight the value of interdisciplinarity within PGR work, with important implications for the structuring of academic life. In addition, we found that PGRs held differing views for the future of the discipline but agreed that IR needed to continue to evolve theoretically and methodologically. Within this paper we will explore these differing views to demonstrate the various directions for IR and how PGRs negotiated these within the academic social space, their own research projects, and prospective careers. Most crucially, we wish to highlight PGRs as the silent inheritor of a discipline experiencing conflicting evolutions.
