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Girlhood at War
This book tells the true story of a young girl growing up during the Kosovo war and its immediate aftermath following Kosovo's liberation by NATO troops in 1999. Through her embodied experiences, the book exposes the tangible and everyday acts and events of the war, providing brutal insight into the impact of war and the politics of subjugation. At the outset of the book (in 1998), Vjosa's view of the world, as a young child, is organized in clear dichotomies: the good Albanians and the evil Serbs; the brutal Serbian military shelling Albanian civilians and the angelic NATO airplanes bombing Serbian military sites. This Manichean worldview starts to unravel after Vjosa and her family are cha...
Writing Saved Me
Writing is a central part of the life of a scholar-academic. The writing that makes it into public spaces, however, is but a glimpse of the writing we do and might find meaningful. This edited volume is an attempt to collect writing that often remains hidden in academia – the email exchange with a student or colleagues, the writing that grapples with our loneliness, rage, and failures – and yet provide crucial insight into the ugly realities of global politics and the work that gets done on it (or not) in the neoliberal, extractive university.
Tears of Theory
Tears of Theory demonstrates the value of making storytelling and personal experience integral parts of International Relations (IR) scholarship. Through an examination of the disappearance of Korean Air (KAL) flight 858 in 1987, the book also explores what it means to conduct research in sensitive and difficult settings. According to South Korea, a female secret agent bombed the plane under instructions from the North Korean leadership, killing 115 people. Many unanswered questions emerged and resulted in two rounds of reinvestigations. Taking this case in the context of the ongoing Cold War, Park-Kang presents the story about a researcher, whose life is deeply entangled with the Cold War mystery. The story is based on the author’s dramatic research journey of twenty years on the mysterious spy. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of IR, Asian/Korean Studies, Narrative Studies, Security Studies, Pedagogy and methodology.
Creative Methods in Military Studies
What can creative methods offer our understanding of military power and militarised cultures? What constitutes ‘creative research’ in military studies? And, what are some of the challenges of this type of work? This edited volume brings together authors working at the cutting edge of creative research in military studies, to explore how creativity and creative practice can shed new light on often taken for granted concepts in critical military research. In twelve empirically and conceptually rich chapters, authors from a diverse range of disciplinary fields draw on theatre, model-making, songwriting, dance, spoken word, paper making, and more, to question what military research can and should look like. As a collection, the book explores topics of central concern in military studies such as militarism, military experience, and militarised cultures, as well as more practical questions around ethics, positionality, and research relationships. This path-breaking new volume considers what exactly constitutes creativity in critical military research, while offering the tools for researchers to think anew about big questions in the field.
Paradoxes of Emancipation
In Paradoxes of Emancipation, Dimitris Soudias traces the formation of political subjectivity in times of crisis by attending to the 2011 occupation of Syntagma Square in Athens—the heart of the Greek anti-austerity movement following the debt crisis. Soudias conceives of the Syntagma Square occupation as a lens through which we can critically engage with broader theoretical and political issues: the crumbling promises of the capitalist imaginary, the epistemic “spirit” of neoliberal rationalities, the spatialized practices of navigating precarity and uncertainty, and the prospects for a radically better tomorrow. By challenging both the romanticization of anti-austerity activism and t...
Pedagogy as Encounter
What is the role of politics in the classroom? How does the desire of the teacher shape the pedagogical process? Is teaching possible? Is learning possible? Pedagogy as Encounter engages with such larger issues. The majority of discussions, workshops, conference panels, articles, and books avoid meta-pedagogical issues by focusing on technique. Such “technique talk” examines schemes, methods, and procedures that do and do not work in the classroom. It answers the “how” question at the cost of ignoring these bigger queries. Pedagogy as Encounter consists of 120 vignettes arranged in eight chapters. Most of these are first person autobiographical stories that describe encounters with students and colleagues. They portray a teacher whose classroom disappointments lead him to radical experimentation. But there are also a few theoretical sections, as well as segments that are epigrammatic in nature. All of it is grounded in a Lacanian political psychology and in a critical global political economy. The theory, however, remains largely implicit and is confined to the footnotes. The body of the text is free of jargon and presented in a conversational voice.
Social Movements
In Social Movements: A Theoretical Approach, Dieter Rucht offers a theoretically and historically informed approach to social movements as a phenomenon of modern societies. He links the analysis of social movements to general theories of society and processes of social change, and combines three basic perspectives: interactionist, constructivist, and process-oriented (ICP-approach). Drawing mainly on ideas from Jürgen Habermas, Pierre Bourdieu, and Anthony Giddens, Rucht recommends several revisions and highlights the important role of the public sphere as the central stage for social movements. He argues that it is a realm in its own right and the major domain in which social movements mak...
Sites of Dissent
Contemporary articulations of dissent to social order and its production of truth cannot be ignored any longer. Hamburg during the G20 gathering; Washington, D.C., on the day of Trump’s inauguration; the squares and streets of Paris and Tunis at the end of 2018. Public space is temporarily taken by those who rise against the powers that keep structural oppression and social order in its place. Not only riots, but collective social centres, protest camps and temporary as well as permanent occupations of lands and buildings are other, utopian spatial alternatives created by autonomous social movements to prefigure a horizontal social organization. This book discusses spatial practices of aut...
Riots and Militant Occupations
Riots and Militant Occupations provides students with theoretical reflections and qualitative case studies on militant contentious political action across a range from across Europe to Nigeria, China and Turkey. This multi-authored, interdisciplinary collection adopts an interpretive and participatory approach to examining meanings, affects, embodiment, identity, relationality and space in the context of riots and protests. The rapidly shifting terrain of riots and occupations has left existing social-scientific theories lagging behind, challenging dominant constructions of agency and rationality. This book will fill this gap, by offering new understandings and critical perspectives on the q...
Riots and Militant Occupations
Riots and Militant Occupations provides students with theoretical reflections and qualitative case studies on militant contentious political action across a range from across Europe to Nigeria, China and Turkey. This multi-authored, interdisciplinary collection adopts an interpretive and participatory approach to examining meanings, affects, embodiment, identity, relationality and space in the context of riots and protests. The rapidly shifting terrain of riots and occupations has left existing social-scientific theories lagging behind, challenging dominant constructions of agency and rationality. This book will fill this gap, by offering new understandings and critical perspectives on the q...
