War for Presence: Art, Conflict and Identity at the Art-IR Nexus

30^th June 2018; Department of War Studies, King’s College London, UK

A one-day interdisciplinary workshop exploring the crossover between IR and Art History, common concerns, and interdisciplinary advances with a view to establish a productive conceptual, methodological and analytical agenda for IR and Art Historical research.

Event rationale:

The nexus between the study of International Relations (IR) and Art History is ripe with conceptual, analytical, and empirical opportunities for critical understanding. Art History has long counted on and developed methods and concepts for the study of specific aesthetic functions, including conflict and identity. Likewise, areas of IR scholarship have addressed in various forms the relevance, function and power of the aesthetic, and has long sought to account for the role of such expression in politics. The ‘Aesthetic Turn’ literature has sought to make this crossover productive. However, scholarship between these fields suffers from a lack of aggregation, particularly examination of clear conceptual links and reflection on analytical objectives shared and contested by both disciplines, and the tensions therein. Though valuable contributions have been made, its analytical promise needs to be revisited. How do IR and Art Historical analyses differ and what are the conceptual and methodological reasons for this? Where can they meet? What might such an interdisciplinary crossover look like in the specifics of each discipline and concrete research and analytical goals?This one-day workshop seeks to open an interdisciplinary space for new dialogue between IR scholars and Art Historians working on issues of art and conflict. The core objective is to understand and map what constitutes the shared space between art and IR, its tensions, and the concepts and methods necessary for its interdisciplinary engagement and analytical research productivity. The event will bring together key scholars that have experience of this interdisciplinary space and a range of IR and art practitioners.

Submissions will be sought that relate to

• Theory, methods, and analytical strategies in both IR and Art History
• aesthetics and ethics
• knowledge, power, categorisations and aesthetics
• images and the dilemma of ‘high art’
• sites of art and conflict
• conflict over visibility/invisibility
• nexus of transnational art world, institutions and its localities
• aesthetic analysis and its development
• gendered aesthetics
• hierarchy and power in aesthetic analysis
• locating the politics of art as theory and methodology
• examining aesthetic language
• postcoloniality in aesthetics and decolonising aesthetics
• making art international
• practices and institutional as well as individual power
• agency between art and IR
• the body and art in IR and/or conflict