Openings
International relations are complex, intricate and messy. Often, however, the disciplinary (and disciplining) boundaries of International Relations (IR) as a field curtail our ability to account for these complexities and to depict, narrate and imagine international relations differently. We are therefore pleased to introduce a new creative section within Contemporary Voices: The St Andrews Journal of International Relations (CVIR). Building on CVIR’s aim to transform what and how ‘voices’ are heard in IR , the Openings section provides a site to experiment with different forms of academic practice and to rethink how we ‘do’ IR.
Openings takes up the challenge of publishing innovative scholarship in three critical ways. First, by opening up a space for creative forms of engagement with international relations. Recognising that such spaces are limited within the field of IR, this section provides an open access platform for scholarship that embraces innovative, creative, performative and/or experimental methodologies. These might include, but are certainly not limited to, narrative, (auto)ethnography, dialogue, poetry, performance, photography, film, video remix, and collage. Second, the section serves as an opening for scholarly beginnings and innovations. Openings hopes to initiate conversations that challenge dominant practices of knowledge production and foster new avenues of creative scholarship through a supportive, collaborative and rigorous review process. Third, as an opening that symbolises possibility, this section seeks to reimagine the ‘international’ and the ‘political’ by opening up alternative ways of knowing and understanding the world.
The Openings section of CVIR is therefore a place for interested contributors to come together and challenge the exclusive and exclusionary domain of the ‘academic’. It is explicitly open to submissions from a range of knowledge producers who include, but are not limited to, students, activists, practitioners, and emerging or established scholars. Recognising that its contributors do not neatly fit into discrete categories, Openings is particularly interested in complex knowledge producers who combine and cross these bounds. It rejects the foreclosures of the discipline by counteracting how institutional(ised) and disciplinary boundaries are policed. By doing so, Openings embraces an openness to interdisciplinary scholarship, broadly conceived, and seeks to make possible, and showcase, multiple forms of enquiry. By embodying inclusiveness, multiplicity and interdisciplinarity to generate new insights on international relations, we hope that Openings can also contribute to opening up the discipline of IR itself.
We invite submissions in a range of formats including (auto)ethnography, narrative, dialogue, artwork, collage, poetry, performance, photography, film, video remix, and many more. If you have an idea for a Special Issue or a submission you would like to discuss, we would love to hear from you. Submit your creative and alternative scholarship to the CVIR website and/or get in touch with us to discuss your contribution by using the details below.
Openings founding co-editors,
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Lydia Cole Durham University |
Laura Mills University of St Andrews |