S09: Dislocating Geopower: New Approaches to Space, Culture, and Violence in World Politics

Summary: This interdisciplinary section will bring together leading and emerging scholars who are currently exploring the state of the art at the intersections of space, culture, and violence in world politics.  While these intersections have been a long-standing concern in political geography and popular geopolitics, critical international relations has more recently developed a growing interest in how space, culture, and violence are mutually constitutive. While initial concerns focused on representation and inter-textuality to ascertain how space, culture, and violence are implicated in the production of world politics, there are emerging strands of research that assess the materiality of space, culture, and violence to determine how their embodiment may also contribute to practices of geopower. Panels and papers will thus explore the discursive and material connections linking space, culture, and violence through a range of case studies, methodological approaches, and interdisciplinary perspectives.

Rationale: It is a productive time to explore the connections amongst space, culture, and violence because of the shared interest across international political sociology, critical security studies, political geography, contentious politics, political ethnography, and popular culture and world politics. Each field brings its own set of questions in relation to how space, culture, and violence matter, when they matter, where they matter, to whom they matter, and how to best capture their myriad connections. Thus, this section will encourage interdisciplinary dialogues across fields and approaches for the purposes of advancing understandings of geopower in world politics.