Description
Over the past decades, international studies scholars have become increasingly attentive to the role of movement in global politics. However, the primacy of movement as a constitutive and relational element of global politics is often hidden by the academic frameworks within which questions of movement are approached. This panel explores the politics of theorising movement and brings together scholars who are attending to the concepts by which movement is understood, and exploring new modes of theorising politics through movement. The panel is an invitation to bracket an international studies that organises political life by means of territorial tropes of sovereignty and borders, and to conceptualise movement in a manner that conveys the turbulence and transversality of the worlds we study and live in. The panelists interrogate and re-think concepts of ‘nomad’, ‘home’, ‘tourist’, ‘soldier’, ‘explorer’ to parse their associations with state and territory, and attend to the constitutive role of movement, from the colonial origins of Australia’s contemporary carceral island borders, to the management of bodily movement at the Imperial War Museum.
