Lucid Theory Workshop: Between Philosophy & World Politics

Posted by Anthony Burke on November 17, 2014 in Theory |One Comment

Lucid Theory

Writing Between Philosophy and World Politics

Monday 24 November 2014
The University of New South Wales, Australia
Morven Brown Building, Upper Campus, Room 310

Places are available: Please RSVP to a.burke@adfa.edu.au and a.bloomfield@unsw.edu.au

Download the full LucidTheory_Program+map.

This workshop aims to stage a dual dialogue: between the methods and concerns of philosophy and international relations, and between philosophers and international relations theorists themselves. It recognizes that while IR theorists have long been drawing upon and contributing to philosophy, and philosophers have been directly engaging problems and ontologies in world politics, there are few useful sites of contact, crossover and collaboration between these two scholarly communities. They have separate traditions and sites of intellectual training, tend to publish in different journals, and rarely attend the same conferences. Even as they are pursuing trans-disciplinary forms of scholarship, they do so separately. We use the term “lucid” purposefully to reflect on bringing this association between philosophy and International Relations into greater clarity, by reflecting on the theme of light and dark that appears in our understandings of philosophy. The imagery of the word lucid—as that which is luminous or bright—becomes as crucial as the textual connections between the two disciplines: What can this metaphor make visible to those writing and studying in these points of contact? How can one field illuminate the other? Alternatively, can we also recover what cannot be illuminated as we would understand it in the Enlightenment tradition, given its suspect and ambiguous history? Should we be searching in the shadows? The workshop aims to explore common areas of research and intellectual concern, and to generate fruitful learning and dialogue, both across our fields and the analytical and continental approaches to philosophy. Over the longer-term, we hope this will build into closer collaboration and ongoing communication.