Intimate geopolitics

Leverhulme Visiting Professorship

In 2016, the Critical Global Politics research cluster hosted Professor V. Spike Peterson - from The University of Arizona - as a visiting Leverhulme Professor, as part of the 'Intimate geopolitics' project. Led by Dr Elena Barabantseva and Dr Aoileann Ní Mhurchú, both part of the Politics Department at The University of Manchester.

The project aims to explore how geopolitical processes are internalised, resisted, and regulated through intimate spaces such as institutions of marriage, intergenerational relations, social reproduction, aspects of love, emotions and affect.

It taps into growing interest around geopolitical processes of security and governance linked to intimacy and subjectivity of the everyday. With a particular interest in the dynamic ways, 'the intimate' can be understood as a terrain of inquiry which re-centres research, study and knowledge about geopolitics and international relations as a relationship across thinking and feeling self/selves and a wide array of practices of regulation and governance. 

This visit produced a series of academic and public events including two talks by Professor Peterson:

Blog posts on the events, written by Jennifer Hobbs:

There is also further reading: