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:
- 'In conversation' with V. Spike Peterson. 'Intimate politics and global inequalities: the pleasure and pain of border crossings'.
- 'Intimate geopolitics' workshop keynote: 'intimacy, geopolitics and state'.
Blog posts on the events, written by Jennifer Hobbs:
- Intimate geopolitics and global inequalities: the pleasure and pain of border crossings - Professor V. Spike Peterson.
- 'Getting intimate to rethink international relations' workshop.
- Intimate geopolitics two-day workshop.
There is also further reading:
- Aoileann Ní Mhurchú (2019) 'Intimately inhabiting borders: walking in between belonging and otherness through constructions of home'. Geopolitics.
- Barabantseva, E., Ní Mhurchú, A., Peterson, V.S. (2019) 'Intimate Geopolitics', special issue, Geopolitics - introduction, afterword and articles by Barabantseva, Daigle, Ní Mhurchú, Shindo, Turner and Vera Espinoza, and Tyerman.
- Peterson, V.S., Barabantseva, E., and Ní Mhurchú, A. (2018) 'On intimacy, geopolitics and discipline: Elena Barabantseva and Aoileann Ní Mhurchú in conversation with V. Spike Peterson. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 20(2): 258-271.