Rethinking The Body in Global Politics: Roundtable Proposal
ISA 2024 San Francisco 3-6 April 2024
Organiser: Kandida Purnell
Bodies are contested sites of global politics. This is the main contention of ‘Rethinking the Body in Global Politics’ (Purnell, 2021). These roundtables bring together scholars starting their diverse investigations into local–national-international relations with and from bodies as a means to continue the conversation around the implications of bringing the body into the discipline of International Relations (IR) as a fourth ‘level’ of analysis on top of ‘man’, ‘the state’, and ‘war’.
Part 1: Martial bodies, ‘Other’ Bodies
This roundtable (1/2 in this linked series) rethinks the body in local-global politics and relations, foregrounding processes and practices involved in the continually contested (re/dis)embodiment of martial and ‘other’ (gendered, raced, differently abled) bodies. The panel will duly explore bodies and their precarious, ontologically insecure, and emotional facets; the fleshing out of contemporary bio-necro(body)politics; and the visual-emotional politics embodied through a range of empirical sites and settings. Given the interdisciplinary approach of contributions centring the body, the theoretical/conceptual analyses discussed in this roundtable will feed into contemporary IR debates while also speaking to broader interdisciplinary questions about relationality, bodies and embodiment, visual politics, biopolitics, necropolitics, affect/emotions, and power/resistance.
Part 2: Bodies of Knowledge
This roundtable (2/2 in this linked series) continues to rethink the body in local-global politics and relations, foregrounding processes and practices involved in the continually contested (re/dis)embodiment of bodies via technologies of power/knowledge. The panel will duly explore bodies and their precarious, ontologically insecure, and emotional facets; the fleshing out of contemporary bio-necro(body)politics; and the visual-emotional politics embodied through the very process of research and ‘fieldwork’ and a range of empirical settings including the border, gene patenting, and military technologies. Given the interdisciplinary approach of contributions centring the body, the theoretical/conceptual analyses discussed in this roundtable will feed into contemporary IR debates while also speaking to broader interdisciplinary questions about relationality, bodies and embodiment, visual politics, biopolitics, necropolitics, affect/emotions, and power/resistance.
**Please e-mail PurnelK@Richmond.ac.uk before Mon 29th May 2359 (UK time) with expressions of interest**
Dr Kandida Purnell 