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This article argues that textiling—a particular kind of making that simultaneously constitutes a concept, a metaphor, and a practice—can facilitate a radical rethinking and redoing of the study of world politics. Specifically, we suggest three ways in which textiling, and the relationality it enables, facilitates this innovation: as a different way...
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Context 1
... a truth commission's final report as a woven fabric allows us to make new sense of how some storylines of victimization are woven into it while others are not. As a new piece of fabric emerges from the encounter between the weaver and the threads ( Figure 2 ), so a truth commission's report emerges from the encounter between those who write it and those whose storylines are included. The production of these reports is usually an effort to enclose serious human rights violations into a finished past that is clearly distinguished from the present and thus allows for a hopeful future ( Cuéllar 2017 ). ...
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... of victims, however, challenge these clearcut temporal ruptures. Their singular materiality resists efforts at neatly shaping and bounding the report, just like some of the threads in Figure 2 resist being neatly woven into the emergent piece of cloth. ...
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... the metaphor/practice of weaving also enables us to theorize how victims' stories are woven so as to be visible both as a singular case and as part of an emerging pattern. In Figure 2 , while the green, pink, blue, and brown threads can still be distinguished in their singularity, the weaving has altered them. In any textile, threads are bound in sympathy rather than "merely" joined up, and when a textile is unraveled, the threads from which it had been made retain a memory of their former association ( Ingold 2015 , 23-5; see also Figure 7 ). ...
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... metaphor of weaving highlights how creative and narrative methods aided the emergent and artisanal character of her research, its being pursued as an open process with "a unique result that [. . .] carries the particular stamp of its creators" ( Arias López 2014 , 113; cf. also Figure 2 ). ...
Citations
... As Andrä et al. (2020, p. 348) discuss with regard to "conflict textiles," textile "materials arouse our sense of touch and shape our feelings towards them." According to textile artist Mercy Rojas (cited in Andrä et al., 2023), this is because textiles are "the intimate material that acts as a boundary between our skin and the world, that wraps our dreams and our despair, and that frees us with an intimate scream when it becomes our voice." Materials can also carry historical memories, for example when second-hand fabrics imbued with particular meaning-such as the clothes of forcibly disappeared people in Latin America-are used for textile interventions. ...
... Materials can also carry historical memories, for example when second-hand fabrics imbued with particular meaning-such as the clothes of forcibly disappeared people in Latin America-are used for textile interventions. Andrä et al. (2023) argue that it is particularly the process of making involved in crafts such as textile-making, understood not as the imposition of a preconceived form onto pliable matter but rather in Ingold's (2013, p. 21) sense, as "morphogenetic"-that is, as a process of co-generation between maker and matter "in anticipation of what might emerge," which gives crafts such as textile-making their power to "textile" or "give texture to" politics (Bryan-Wilson, 2017, p. 7). It is in this sense that making processes open up possibilities for different sociopolitical imaginaries that can contribute to peace but which can be uneven and show their knots and entanglements (Andrä, 2022a(Andrä, , 2022b. ...
While the arts can be observed to play a role in both violence and peacemaking, they are often assumed to make positive contributions to postwar peacebuilding processes and have increasingly become attached to ideas of “positive peace” in different key (sub-)disciplines that contribute to the field of “art and peacebuilding” scholarship. Art forms that have been linked with peacebuilding include animation, curating and exhibiting, dance, drawing and painting, filmmaking, music, photography, poetry and fiction, sculpture, sound art, storytelling, street art, textile-making, and theater and performance, among others. The most common uses and potentials of art in and for peacebuilding concern artistic forms as peacebuilding tools; the power of peace aesthetics in changing sociopolitical imaginaries; and the community-building potentials of the arts. Research increasingly suggests that the particular value of the arts with regard to peacebuilding may lie in their capacity to bear and hold within them tensions, struggles, and differences, and thereby to contribute not to an idealized “harmonious” but a more real-type agonistic peace. There are, however, also important limits and challenges of art in and for peacebuilding, such as the risk of political and epistemic closure when arts are instrumentalized for predefined ends, questions of hierarchies regarding different artistic forms, and ethical questions arising from relationships involving large power differentials. These limits and challenges need to be addressed for the arts’ positive contribution to peacebuilding processes to unfold.
This special issue explores how popular culture shapes local, regional, national, and global perceptions of Ukraine amid the ongoing war with Russia. Integrating literatures on popular geopolitics, vernacular and aesthetic IR, and Ukraine studies, we delve into the complexities of the knowledge-making about Ukraine that takes place at the interstices of the everyday, the aesthetic, and the international. Given the mutually implicated relationship between popular culture and world politics, the popular representations of the Ukrainian subject both mirror and shape prevailing narratives, practices, identities, and power relations. But we also inquire into how popular culture serves as a space for political resistance and activism by those existing at the margins of world politics. By centering the Ukrainian perspective in all its multiplicity, the special issue helps to challenge the Western- and Russian-centric prism through which Ukraine has been approached in IR and related disciplines.
