Workshop: Anthropology meets International Relations: potentials, prospects and pitfalls

Call for Papers Submission deadline: May 15, 2012 Workshop date: November 29-30, 2012 Workshop venue: Peace Research Institute Frankfurt

Organised by the Chair for International Organisations at the Goethe University Frankfurt and the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF/HSFK) Since international relations have been described as a cultural system, anthropologists and political scientists have experimented with multiple ways of encounter and interdisciplinarity. Ethnography has become a popular term in the discipline of International Relations (IR) since advocates of the so-called practice turn adopted ethnographic studies as one method of choice. A new generation of researchers seems to be fascinated by the prospect to leave the armchair and enter the field. At the same time, anthropologists are studying the social facts of international relations. Building upon a strong tradition of concern with politics, they turned their attention to international organisations, development, postcolonial conflicts and peace building. Anthropologists and political scientists alike develop theories about the world system, global flows between a patchwork of centres and peripheries, and entanglements between the local and the global. This workshop seeks to move beyond a mere methodological leaning to explore the full potential of the particular interdisciplinarity between anthropology and IR on three different levels theory, methodology, and thematic fields: Which theories are particularly useful to travel across disciplinary boundaries, and which theories may emerge from this nexus? How do researchers crossing these boundaries conduct fieldwork? Which research questions and social phenomena call for, and benefit from, an interdisciplinary approach between IR and anthropology? And where are the limits to this all where it best makes sense to let anthropologists be anthropologists and IR researchers be IR researchers? This call is addressed to both political scientists interested in anthropology, and anthropologists working on topics of international relations to provide a forum for dialogue and debate. The workshop is the first of a planned series and marks an initiative to foster closer collaboration between the two disciplines and the involved institutions in Frankfurt. Paper proposals and questions concerning the workshop can be directed to workshop@hsfk.de. Proposals must not exceed a length of 250 words and should contain the name, contact details and institutional affiliation of the speaker. The deadline for submissions is May 15, 2012. Selected speakers will be informed before July 1, 2012. A joint publication of conference papers is envisaged.