CALL FOR PAPERS

10th Pan-European Conference on International Relations, Izmir, Turkey, 7-10 Sept 2016

S51: TIPPING THE BOUNDARIES: WORLD SOCIETY AND THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENTIATION

This section explores the ways in which social differentiation unfolds in world society by inquiring into the politics involved when boundaries are drawn. To this end, the section focuses on the processes and logics of ‘co-production’ of social order(s) and disciplinary forms of knowledge by (re)tracing how boundaries are narrated, enacted and contested through the politics of differentiation.

Narration thus constructs and potentially contests boundaries by carving up the world into different objects, spaces, and subject positions. This primary meaning-construction by narrative, however, regularly condenses into more stable forms of classification, categorizations, or entire technological and epistemic infrastructures that enact social spheres by representing and intervening in them. Disciplines, such as History, Law, Economics, Sociology, and International Relations, incorporate distinct capacities to ‘see’ the social fabric on a global scale. For this reason, claims about the truth of their observations, their ability to (re)define or their capacity for interconnecting are rooted in the politics of differentiation within and between the respective disciplines. Mainstream IR, for instance, has for long evoked ideas of anarchy and sovereign equality resting on seemingly naturalized notions of inclusion and exclusion within the discipline.

This section, in turn, sets out to ‘tip the boundaries’ in questioning how such logics of differentiation have emerged as well as constitutively impacted on (inter)disciplinarity and hence the production of knowledge in a world society. Modes and patterns of differentiation in world society thus do not simply follow spatial or functional lines, but depend on the ways in which different knowledges are constructed and enacted. To understand such practices and epistemes in and through which logics of differentiation are established, normalized, sustained and potentially contested, this section calls for contributions that are situated at the boundaries of disciplines with the perspective of analyzing processes of connectivity and separation which in their aggregate constitute the social epistemology of a world society.

The section is organized around four main themes. Each theme addresses a privileged logic or process in relation to the constitutive effects of politics of differentiation on the (re)production of disciplinary boundaries within and beyond IR in the context of a world society: that is, narrating, calculating, ruling and networking.

• Narrating IR: Histories and Emerging Identities in a World Society

• Calculating IR: Devices of Governmentality and Its Epistemic Practices

• Ruling IR: Constituting Legality, Differentiating Legitimacy

• Networking IR: The Politics of (Dis)Connectivity in a World Society

Deadline for submission of abstracts consisting of max. 200 words: *08 January 2016*

For submission please register here: https://www.conftool.pro/paneuropean2016/

For more information visit: http://www.paneuropeanconference.org/2016/

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