Learning/unlearning in International Relations through the politics of margins and silence

Abstract

ABSTRACT As an auto-ethnography, this essay offers my learning and teaching in International Relations through the politics of margins and silences. I note that recentering margins and unpacking multiple silences are not so simple. They generate their own discomforts and unlearning. Through my academic encounters of forging feminist relationships, debating race and racism, and efforts to decolonise knowledge in academia, I observe that these are compounded (and complicated) by everyday life and personal struggles. I maintain that despite crucial progress in the discipline, knowledge is being produced about people, who are actual repositories of knowledge and we have learnt little from them. While margins of the discipline is now a thriving and powerful space, it is appropriated by privileged voices, including those of feminists of global south and north, who are embedded in institutional and structural hierarchies. We need radical, multi-disciplinary methodological tools to decentre state and regional interests and unlearn some of the traditional ways we have been taught to think about what is IR and what is not.