Description
This panel sets out to explore the empirical and theoretical interconnections between cultures and practices of secrecy/ignorance/forgetting and ways of knowing in International Studies. While International Studies has attended to knowledge-making practices as connected to power, the extent to which secrecy and ignorance are part of knowledge-making and unmaking remains underexplored. This panel therefore proposes to bring into conversation insights from secrecy and ignorance studies to bear on the production of knowledge within International Studies, particularly in relation to the gendered, raced and queered ways in which knowledge is (un)made.
This panel aims to ‘thicken’ the understanding of secrecy within security discourses and International Studies, disrupting and overturning binaries that continue to reproduce secrecy as absent and unproductive, that continue to focus on state level secrecy practices, that reproduce the association of knowledge with vision and virtue, and that ignore the contributions of feminist, critical race and queer theorists and their contributions to understanding power/knowledge as connected to secrecy.
