Call for roundtable participants - EISA PEC 2025

[IPS Section]

Dear Colleagues,

Please help us circulate the call for participants below.

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CALL FOR ROUNDTABLE PARTICIPANTS

18th EISA PEC, 25-29 August 2025

“Reimagining Security through Aesthetic Practice”

Bohdana Kurylo (LSE)

Irem Cihan (SOAS)

This roundtable explores how aesthetic approaches offer novel pathways for understanding contemporary security in a world marked by persistent conflict. At a moment when conventional vocabularies for discussing war, trauma, and peace have become increasingly constrained, we examine how aesthetic practices might reopen spaces for critical engagement with security from the perspective of diverse actors, subjectivities, and forms of knowledges in global politics. By bringing together scholars working across Aesthetic IR, critical security studies, and International Political Sociology, the discussion interrogates how aesthetic sensibilities – from visual representation to performative politics – shape our perception of security and frame possibilities for alternative futures. Participants will explore how artistic interventions reveal what great power politics and technostrategic security language often obscure: the embodied experiences, affective dimensions, and everyday practices that constitute lived realities of conflict and insecurity. How might artistic practices help communities imagine security alternatives when existing institutions fail? How does aesthetics interact with memory and shape the ways in which past and ongoing violence is narrated, contested, and remembered? How do status and aesthetic representations deepen or challenge the cultural order in global politics? And how does temporality shape aesthetic engagements with security, whether through nostalgia, futurity, or the mediation of historical narratives? The roundtable ultimately suggests that aesthetic engagement offers not merely representational alternatives but potentially transformative political possibilities.

We invite participants whose research broadly speaks to any of these themes. If you are interested in participating, please contact the organizers with a brief description of your proposed topic at b.ku...@lse.ac.uk and 667...@soas.ac.uk by March 19, 2025.

Very truly yours,

Bohdana

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Bohdana Kurylo

Fellow in Qualitative Methodology

Department of Methodology

London School of Economics & Political Science