RGIPS Newsletter, January-March 2025
Dear students, colleagues, and friends,
Welcome to the newest edition of the Research Group on IPS newsletter, bringing you the latest news, events and research relating to the IPS research-node in SPIR. Enjoy the short read.
Upcoming events
Polyphonic Encounter: Rethinking Borders: Power, Inclusion, and Alternative Imaginaries
Wednesday 12th February, 12:30-14:00. Queen Mary; Laws G5. Organised by Cristina Juverdeanu.
The roundtable Rethinking Borders: Power, Inclusion, and Alternative Imaginaries is set to critically examine the functions of borders and how dynamics of inclusion and exclusion consolidate or challenge existing power hierarchies. It invites speakers to reflect on how cross-border practices can help reimagine traditional borders and aims to encourage discussion on alternative border imaginaries and their potential for emancipation. The discussion is an invitation to critically engage with the realities and possibilities of borders today.
Chair: Mirko Palestrino
Participants: Madeleine Berry; Anastasia Barclay; Timor Landherr; and Cristina Juverdeanu
DoingIPS PhD Seminar: “The politics of scapegoating socialisation in state (re-)encounter narratives: Russia 1999-2014”
Friday 21st February, 15:00 – 17:00. King’s College London; Room tbc. Presenter: Anni Roth Hjermann.
DoingIPS PhD Seminar Series is a series of events organised by representatives of DoingIPS from Queen Mary, King’s College, and London School of Economics. It is not directly related to QMUL’s RGIPS; however, these events may still be of interest to RGIPS members.
Presenter: Anni Roth Hjermann, University of Cambridge
Paper topic: “The politics of scapegoating socialisation in state (re-)encounter narratives: Russia 1999-2014"
Polyphonic Encounter: Un/Mapping the International
March. Exact date and location tbc. Organised by Ana Barclay and Brunno Cunha.
This Polyphonic Encounter event investigates different ways of imagining, composing, dispersing and disrupting the spatiality of the international through various mapping techniques to question our (geo)political imagination. Roundtable contributors, including Dr Aya Nassar (Durham University) and Dr Farai Chipato (University of Glasgow), span a broad range of perspectives that challenge the notion of ‘mapping’ as a purely cartographic exercise designed to visually represent territorial demarcation. During the event, we will explore different spatio-political imaginaries and potentialities which emerge from critical approaches to topographic representations of the international.
If you are interested in participating, please contact Ana Barclay (a.j.barclay@hss24.qmul.ac.uk) or Brunno Cunha (b.v.freitascunha@qmul.ac.uk) by the end of February.
Annual Spring Symposium: Haunting Histories
Friday 25th April, 09:00-19:00. Queen Mary; Colette Bowe Room. Organised by Jaako Heiskanen and Joanne Yao.
‘Haunting Histories’ invites participants to reflect on the role of history in shaping world politics and the ways we understand, (re)construct, and are moved by the past. Questions to be explored include: How do legacies of empire and colonialism continue to haunt world politics in the twenty-first century? How can historical analogies illuminate contemporary political problems by resurrecting the spectre of the past, and what are the limits of analogical thinking? How might histories be animated by more-than-human forces from the natural to the supernatural to capitalism? How can we balance fine-grained historical scholarship with interconnected histories that cut across spatial or temporal boundaries? This symposium brings together an interdisciplinary, international team of senior and early career scholars working at the cutting edge of these questions.
For more information on participants, and to reserve a spot, see here.
PhD & Early Career Publishing and Project Development Workshop with Prof. Stefano Guzzini
Tuesday 29th April, full day. Queen Mary. Organised by Jaakko Heiskanen.
Abstract deadline: Tuesday 25th March.
Paper deadline: Friday 18th April.
Prof. Stefano Guzzini will be coming to SPIR on Tuesday 29 April to give a full-day workshop with eight PhD students and early career scholars.
Stefano has been giving these workshops at the LSE since 2018 and at SPIR since 2023, and we are delighted that he is joining us again this year. Stefano currently holds the Chair in Political and Social Theory at the European University Institute, as well as the Swiss Co-chair in Federalism, Democracy and International Governance. His research focus lies within the field of International Relations, relying on social and political theory, political science, sociology, and political economy.
PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, and early career scholars are all welcome to apply. Each participant will be asked to submit a work in progress, and Stefano and the group will meet for the day to discuss each work in detail.
If you are interested, please email Jaakko Heiskanen (j.heiskanen@qmul.ac.uk) with a title and short abstract by Tuesday 25 March. Full papers will be due by Friday 18 April.
RGIPS General Assembly
Tuesday 20th May, 15:00-17:00. Queen Mary; ArtsOne 1.36. Organised by Mirko Palestrino.
Meeting for RGIPS members to share feedback on our first year and to begin planning activities for 2025-26.
Previous events
Symposium: The Slipperiness of Empathy: Navigating through Seas of (In)visibility and Erasure
31st January. University of Cambridge; Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CRASSH).
This symposium and exhibition explored visibility and erasure within the context of mobility control, the global border regime, and histories of empire. Bringing together artists, curators, and researchers, this trans-disciplinary symposium took multi-sensorial, creative practices as a crucial point of departure, with the aim of opening the door for conversations on how artwork can offer a novel perspective that goes beyond traditional institutional frames and dominant ways of producing knowledge.
For further information, see here.
Call for papers
EISA Pan-European Conference on International Relations (PEC); IPS Standing Section Doing International Political Sociology
25-29 August 2025. University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy.
Submission deadline: Thursday 20th March 2025.
Prof. Jef Huysmans (Queen Mary University of London) and Dr. Renata Summa (University of Groningen) are inviting panel, roundtable, and paper proposals for the IPS Standing Section Doing International Political Sociology at the EISA Pan-European Conference in Bolonga, Italy.
The Standing Section on International Political Sociology (IPS) aims to provide a space at EISA conferences for engaging with research agendas that revolve around international political sociology as a site for critical explorations of the ‘problem of the international’. This programme focuses on the significance of boundary-crossing phenomena in world politics and the dynamics of fracturing social and political orders.
The section will promote international political sociologies on topics that populate IPS’s research programmes, including migration and various forms of human and non-human circulation and mobility, securitisation, surveillance, resistance and counter-politics, social movements, citizenship, planetary urbanism and global cities, post-truth, temporalities and histories, technologies of governance, and critical methodologies and knowledge production. We will also continue to promote both theoretical and empirical work regarding concepts such as movement, transversality, becoming, critique, practice, atmospheres, affects, the everyday, assemblages, borders, inequality, and the planetary.
For more information on the conference, see here.
The link to the submission page can be found here.
EISA European Workshops in International Studies (EWIS); Workshop on “Thinking Crisis Beyond Decision-Making
2-4 July 2025. Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland.
Submission deadline: Tuesday 11th February 2025.
Nadine Klopf (University of Kiel) & Dirk Nabers (University of Kiel) are organizing a workshop on “Thinking Crisis Beyond Decision-Making” for the European Workshops in International Studies (EWIS), taking place in Krakow from 2–4 July 2025.
They welcome contributions engaging with crisis broadly understood and encourage submissions from both early-career and senior scholars across the social sciences and humanities. They particularly invite work from underrepresented frameworks, including poststructuralist, postcolonial, queer-feminist, critical Black and Indigenous approaches.
If you are interested in participating, please submit an abstract via the official system and select the workshop (WS X) by 11 February 2025.
Awards
British Academy International Writing Workshops Grant, 2025-2027
The Research Group International Political Sociology has been awarded a British Academy International Writing Workshops Grant for a series of workshops on International Political Sociology: Transversal Writing and Publishing II.
The workshops will be organised in collaboration with the Institute for International Relations (IRI) at the Pontifical Catholic University in Rio de Janeiro. They will involve early-career researchers from Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia and will be incorporated into the next two editions of the Annual Winter School in International Political Sociology, organised by IRI. This project is part of the collaboration between SPIR and IRI in the field of International Political Sociology since 2016.
The project PI is Jef Huysmans (QMUL), and the Co-PI is João P. Nogueira (PUC-Rio).
The project runs from March 2025 until February 2027.
Many thanks to Jef and João for their work in securing this grant.
LISS DTP Winter Gathering Poster Presentation
A special congratulations to RGIPS member Nicholas Chukwudike Anakwue for winning First Prize at LISS DTP’s Winter Gathering poster presentation session. In a lightning poster competition where second year PhD candidates demonstrate and present their research, Nicholas’ poster, Identity Formation and Mobilisation: The Influence of Hashtag Activism on Protest Movements in Sub Saharan Africa was voted first place.
Click here to check it out! Other submissions can be found here.
A heartfelt congratulations from all of us, Nicholas!
We hope you enjoyed this newsletter and wish you a lovely semester.
Jef Huysmans, Mirko Palestrino, and Anastasia (Ana) Barclay