CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2022
| Author | Bot, Madalina |
|---|---|
| Title | I think, therefore I IR (?!) Switching between the by-the-book and the creative understanding of the discipline |
| Summary | This thesis explores in a narrative style the contrast between the discipline of International Relations (IR) as a textbook understanding and IR as a personally filtered, misused, abused, re-invented, exploited for personal comfort, taken ad litteram tapestry of concepts. As a field whose main subject matters are power struggles, war, and peace , the outburst of the war in Ukraine catalysed this comfortably abstract landscape. The thesis thus explores what it beneath the abstract by depicting snippets of conversations I had with five of my IR classmates. By drawing on the resources of narrative and autoethnographic IR and taking the everyday as conceptual backbone of this writing project, the stories stand to show the various ways of thinking and feeling about our chosen field of study. The versions of micropolitics I discovered in my classmates’ stories are not necessarily something we usually approach in the academic for a, but which build a more alive, less pretentious and thus surprising IR. There might not be something intrinsically fascinating about theory. However, what people do with it, the hypothetical worlds they are building, the ones they are demolishing and the way they engage in these processes definitely is. |
| Supervisor | Merlingen, Michael |
| Department | International Relations MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2022/bot_madalina.pdf |
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