PTSD

The Politics of Conferences

Stay tuned for an (edited) version of my conference notes--there were some interesting things that went on in the two days. There were also several "WTF?" moments, the biggest of which came right at the end, when (as far as I could tell) the majority of the participants decided that they wanted to go ahead and give a big raspberry to the dominant strains of IR theory. Now, I may not be entirely clear on my ontological foundations, but I'm positive that I wouldn't describe them as "Down with all liberalism!" Down with bad liberalism, down with using liberal principles to bludgeon all those who disagree into Alternatives, down with liberal theorists who claim to be realists, maybe. But is it really okay to make a categorical assumption that everyone who deals with universals is against the r-c agenda (whatever that agenda turns out to be?) I'm thinking no.

So for the moment, I'm choosing avoidance as my strategy. I'll get back to the realist-constructivist stuff in a few days when I've had a chance to process what I saw and think about how best to describe it to people who weren't sitting in the room. My reluctance to follow the usual policy around here (blog first, think later, in my case) comes from a long conversation I had immediately after the conference (workshop, whatever) with a rotating series of people. Over that six hours (and with the addition of another brief discussion on Sunday), I tried to put my finger on what, exactly, bothered me about the whole thing. And it eventually comes down to three points. (Everything in academia comes in threes; why should this be any different?)

1) The proper place of politics (defined in a number of very different ways) in the academic sphere [had to use sphere--just for Priya]

2) My visceral reactions to moves that I consider to be in furtherance of private agendas, and whether it's okay to have them.

3) The question I got from a very smart person who's known me long enough to be surprised by the person I'm becoming: "you do realize that you're living in a very small place, and that there's a much bigger world out there?"

I've deliberately left the language vague, because this is stuff that is important to me on several levels. All three of these things came up as overt issues in this really exciting conversation. But not all of them got answers, or even acknowledgement as legitimate questions. Now, while I'm glad that sitting in the room for two days got me thinking about the questions and considering my own reasons for having them, I haven't yet decided if I'm willing to set aside my annoyance and disappointment in order to think about the topic of realist-constructivism as a serious theoretical location.

So, in answer to my brother's question, "how was your conference thing?" I'd have to say it was fun, but weird because it's hard to predict the results of a paradigm shift.

posted by Elizabeth @ 5:59 PM