Workshop:

‘Fields’ of IR: (Epistemic) Violence, Real-Life Encounters and Methodologies

1-4 July, 2020, Brussels * Postponed to 2021 due to COVID-19*

An increasing number of IR scholars engage in different forms of ‘fieldwork’ across the world, researching sites marked by similar global inequalities, violences, and dangers. In doing so, students, researchers and professors have aimed to bring the ‘reality on the ground’ to the forefront of their analytical work on war, peace, terrorism, globalization, commerce, migration, fragile states and the like. Despite the ethical and political difficulties of such work, surprisingly little attention has been focused on the private, secret and other ‘lives’ of the countless individuals – researchers, brokers, assistants, informants, and organizations alike – who populate the ‘fields’ of IR.

This European Workshop in International Studies will bring our shared expertise to bear on emerging discussions on how we research world politics: to interrogate our moral, discursive and material ‘fieldwork’ practices from a creative, inter- disciplinary and critical lens, and to explore novel perspectives that help bringing forward increasingly diverse outlooks into IR.