Composing Collaborationist Collages about Commercial Security

Abstract

This article is an argument about why it is worth taking the trouble to work with feminist, new materialist approaches inspired by Haraway, Mol, Stengers and others, when studying IR questions. It introduces and exemplifies one specific analytical strategy for doing so, namely one of “composing collaborationist collages”, focusing first on the main building blocks of the approach and then on the (dis-)advantages of working with it. In terms of the building blocks, I underline that composing makes it possible to join the heterogeneous and unlikely, that collaging accentuates the scope for playing with heterogeneity and that collaborating is a necessary part of this process as a well as a helpful check on one’s positionality. I then proceed by focusing on the (dis-)advantages of composing collaborationist collages, making the arguments that this research strategy directs attention to (dis-)connections and to the temporal politics of emergence. It also requires a willingness to face the uncertainties associated with creative academic work. The article introduces composing collaborationist collages as a research strategy. It does so working with material from feminist new materialism, practice theories, the exhibition War Games featuring installations by Hito Steyerl and Martha Rosler and my own work on the politics of commercial security.