The School discusses and analyzes world politics themes from the theoretical and methodological approach of international political sociology. This year, among other topics, we will discuss movement, community and security policies; race and precariousness, migrations and visibility, failures and creativity, media and hate speech.
General Course:
Critical Theories and International Political Sociology
Prof. R B J Walker
The course of Prof. Walker will address International Relations and the challenge of interdisciplinarity, discussing sociology, politics and international as contested objects. In addition, he will discuss the places of science and criticism in the production of knowledge in International Relations, as well as question privilege, Eurocentrism and hegemony as research topics for an International Political Sociology.
RBJ Walker, Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria, Canada, and in the IRI/PUC-RIO.
Thematic Courses:
Failure, Hope & Persistence
Prof. Debbie Lisle
This course outlines and contests the reductive manner in which failure has been conceived in Modernity, and more specifically, in International Relations (e.g. failed states, failed diplomacy, the failure of Great powers). Starting from an acceptance that we are living within structures and orders that constantly fail us, and recognizing that the planet is doomed, it re-imagines an alternative account of failure with more ambiguity, texture and creativity. Drawing from widespread interdisciplinary literatures on pessimism, hope, creativity and futures, it asks instead about persistence and ongoingness: how to live well – how to live ethically – amidst the ruins.
Aesthetic Methods and the Politics of Media
Prof. Michael J. Shapiro
In this course we discuss the problem of precarity and race in world politics looking at a global network of crime organizations that gamble on the games and seek to control the outcomes by recruiting and exploiting young African footballers. As our analysis proceeds we show how the crime drama involving the murder of the young African athlete, Driss Assani (Jeremy Zagba), is a fictional realization of a larger global drama associated with the flow of African and other aspirational footballers that belong to a shadow world behind a sports world. We analyze that global world with resort to documentary and feature films as well as the revelations of investigative journalism.
Michael J. Shapiro is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. His work is often described as “postdisciplinary”, drawing from such diverse fields as political philosophy, critical theory, cultural studies, etc.
Doing IPS: movement fracturing the social and political
Prof. Jef Huysmans
This module examines conceptual and methodological tools of doing International Political Sociology (IPS). It proposes an international political sociology that fractures the social and political through focusing on practices of connecting and becoming. Instead of understanding worlds through dialectics of fragmentation and integration and order and its limits, the module develops concepts and methodologies that focus on transversal relations and immanent creativity.
This year, the module does this by exploring what it would mean to understand life and matter as movement rather than as community or order and how such an approach changes our understanding of the politics of security. Giving movement primacy challenges conceptions of security and its politics that prioritise community, borders, bounded spaces, and the people as analytical categories.
Jef Huysmans is Professor of International Politics at Queen Mary University.
Thematic Courses:
Governing migration through mobility: dispersal, enforced movements and obfuscated visibilities
Prof. Martina Tazzioli
These lectures centre on the use of mobility as a political technology of migration governmentality, bringing attention to how migrants are disciplined, and obstructed not only by being stopped and contained but also by being kept on the move and dispersed across space. This forced hyper-mobility leads migrants to undertake convoluted geographies across Europe and to constantly reroute and repeat their journeys multiple times. In so doing, these lectures question the taken for granted nexus between mobility and freedom.
The Quest for Universalism and the (Im)Possibility of Politics
Prof. Cristina Rojas
The course examines the modern tendency to enact the world as one and the effects it has on the (im)possibility of politics. To make the case, the course will discuss three main universalizing projects: the civilizing mission in the nineteenth century that ran parallel to expansion of capitalism to the periphery; development and the securitization of the nation-state in the mid twentieth century; and neoliberalism and the crisis of reproduction in the 21st century. The discussion will (briefly) review critical paradigms that counter the universalizing tendencies of modernity (dependency, post-structuralism, feminism, subaltern studies, modernity/coloniality/decoloniality, and political ontology). To assess the extent to which these paradigms offer possibility to politics, I use Rancière’s concept of politics as negotiation between worlds and the historical demand for enacting indigenous worlds that has accompanied modern universalism.
Cristina Rojas is Professor at Carleton University.
