This session of the QUALIFIE working group features a talk by Professor Xymena Kurowska (Central European University).
How do interpretive IRists theorise? How can they be persuasive if they weave conceptualisations from within their own imbrication in the practices they study?
The first part of this event systematises the premises of interpretive research in International Relations. Professor Xymena Kurowska (Central European University) draws on existing scholarship to reconstruct how interpretive arguments are constructed through reflexive engagements that require situating within a broader landscape of power relations. The second part of the talk explores in more detail how to respond to the demands of such reflexivity in one’s research practice. She discusses her recent work on the ethics of epistemic practice as a form of ritualisation. Ritualised practices of epistemic community building illustrate well the contextual, performative and power-laden character of knowledge production. The author mobilises ritual and ontological security theories, together with auto-ethnographically generated data, to argue how an interpretive IRist can strive to work as a reflexive ritualist and theorise accordingly.
Speaker:
Xymena Kurowska is a social and International Relations theorist engaged in interpretive policy analysis. She received her doctorate in political and social sciences from European University Institute in Florence, Italy. She works within International Political Sociology, with emphasis on security practices, and uses affect theory, psychosocial and anthropological approaches, and relational and interpretive methodologies. She further explores the ethics of academic practice. She has been a grantee of the European Foreign and Security Policy Studies Programme and a Marie Sklodowska-Curie senior research fellow at the Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth University. She has also served as the CEU principal investigator for the Global Norm Evolution and Responsibility to Protect project, chair of International Political Sociology section at International Studies Association, academic rapporteur for the EU Cyber Direct project, and co-editor-in-chief of Journal of International Relations and Development.
The Zoom link will be provided upon registration.