Speakers:

Alvina Hoffmann is a LISS DTP-funded PhD candidate in the Department of War Studies. She holds an MSc in International Relations from LSE and a Master’s in Human Rights and Humanitarian Action from Sciences Po Paris. She is the co-convenor of the research group Doing International Political Sociology and co-organises its monthly LISS DTP-funded IPS PhD seminar series. She is part of the editorial operations team of the newly created PARISS journal and works as part-time research assistant for the ERC funded project ‘Security Flows’, led by Prof. Claudia Aradau. Previously, she served as social media officer and review article editor of Millennium: Journal of International Studies,  volumes 46-48. Her research interests are in international political sociology, the politics of representation and transdisciplinary and critical approaches in International Relations. 

Title: Unstable Communities - Spokespersons and the conditions of possibility for political speech 

Abstract: This article aims to contribute to debates in legitimisation theory and Bourdieusian-inspired scholarship in International Relations that theorise how elite political actors try to increase their symbolic power and legitimise their political speech vis-à-vis specific audiences or social groups. This literature (implicitly) relies on representational labour of elite spokespersons, by giving an account of how their speech actually constructs and brings into being social groups, reproducing ‘imagined communities’ as actual rather than fictitious homogenous bodies. Yet how is it possible to 'imagine’ these communities in the first place? This article will analyse the conditions of possibility to speak for a social group and hence produce this imagined fictitious community by means of a taken-for-granted feature of political delegation in representative democracy. I will argue that in reproducing the myth of imagined (or homogenous) communities, their inherent arbitrary and instable character is forgotten. The relationship between the spokesperson and social groups is constantly shifting and open to be invoked in different ways. This insight is crucial as this fiction can be disrupted by the arrival of any new spokesperson. I will draw from Pierre Bourdieu’s work on spokespersons and use the annexation of Crimea as a central example to demonstrate my contribution. 

Dr Emma McCluskey is a Teaching Fellow in International Relations and a Research Associate in the Department of War Studies, King’s College, London. She is author of From Righteousness to Far Right: An Anthropological Rethinking of Critical Security Studies (2019) and co-editor in chief of the forthcoming journal Political Anthropological Research on International Social Sciences (PARISS). Her research interests include International Political Sociology, (in)security and surveillance, refugees and migrants in the European Union and the politics of (un)welcoming. She is currently working on GUARDINT; a collaborative project between partners based at King’s College London, Sciences Po Paris, WZB (Berlin Social Science Centre) and Stiftung Neue Verantwortung, and funded under the Open Research Area. The project’s aim is to bridge the gap between increasingly transnational surveillance practices of intelligence agencies and national oversight mechanisms.

Title: Bourdieu the ethnographer: Reconstituting Bourdieusian ‘methods’ to study lived (in)security and xenophobia

Abstract: This paper aims to push the study of (in)security through the work of Bourdieu into more political anthropological and ethnographic directions than the mapping of bureaucratic fields of professionals of (in)security. Thematically, it looks at how transformations in global politics towards increased xenophobia can be examined through mobilising ‘Bourdieu the ethnographer’ (Blommaert 2005). Using the example of Sweden, and an ethnography of everyday life around a refugee resettlement facility, the paper argues that Bourdieu the ethnographer provides important conceptual tools for theorizing the way in which logics of security shifted ever further into everyday life. Through placing ontological primacy on the lived experiences of actors around the refugee facility, and the gradual normalisation of exclusionary and more hard-line politics, mobilising Bourdieu as an ethnographer allows an anthropology of (in)security to be conceptualised temporally instead of spatially, as is the case in much of the recent literature (Maguire et al 2019; Maguire et al 2014; Salter and Mutlu 2012; Goldstein et al 2010). It also enables a practical reflexivity to be built into the research process, whereby reflexive scholarship is conceived of as a collective and continuous process.