Call for Section Proposals is now closed!

13th Pan-European Conference on International Relations
A Century of Show and Tell: The Seen and the Unseen of IR

Wednesday 11 – Saturday 14 September 2019, University of Sofia, Sofia, Bulgaria

Some of the foundational myths of International Relations place the birth of the discipline in the year 1919. Irrespective of this myth’s veracity, a Century is an appropriate period to reflect on what IR has seen and what it has failed to see due to disciplinary practices. Does IR only see what it gets, or does it only get what it sees? For example, have the emphases on systems on one side, and language and social reality on the other overlooked the embodiedness of international relations? As time has moved on, which classics of the field have become overlooked and should be viewed in a new light? At the same time, which scholars or approaches have remained out of sight altogether? Should the field remain attentive to the same phenomena in its second Century, or look at new ones instead, or in addition? How do crises come to the attention of international studies, and shift out of view? 

Furthermore, we live in a time that is visual like never before. Visual representation and visuality as such play an increasingly important role in all political practices that range from personal everyday experiences to interstate high politics, and even to politics of a planetary scale. New and rapidly evolving technologies affect the ways in which the visual shapes politics, security, and warfare. Thus pressing questions for the second Century of IR are: How do the visual and ways of seeing inform the study of international politics? How does IR see, and what has a Century of IR shown?

The 13th Pan-European Conference on International Relations invites the International Studies community to envision what the discipline has seen and what has remained out of its sight. We particularly welcome contributions that explore all the potential directions where the visual can take the discipline and contributions that investigate the range of theoretical, methodological, and empirical implications of the seen and the unseen aspects of IR. While we encourage participants to submit proposals in line with the conference theme, we are open to and invite contributions from all sub-fields of International Studies, as well as from the other branches of the social sciences that are concerned with similar questions and themes. 

The academic programme for the conference will be organized in the usual format of sections composed of panels. A section may consist of either five or ten 105-minute panel sessions during the conference.
 

The tasks for a section chair include:

  • proposing a section around a theme; populating some preliminary panels at the proposal stage; adhering to EISA's inclusive agenda by ensuring that your section has no all-male panels and maintaining a balance between established, emerging, and postgraduate scholars;
  • composing the rest of the section’s programme, by selecting papers that were proposed in response to the call for papers;
  • identifying panel chairs and discussants;
  • taking overall responsibility for the actual execution of their section’s contribution to the conference programme.
     

Proposals for sections should include:

  1. Name, institutional affiliation, EISA membership number and email address of the proposed section chair(s) – maximum two chairs per section.
  2. Proposed section title and summary of its theme(s) and rationale(s) (no more than 250 words). Please state here if your proposed section is to contain 5 or 10 panels.
  3. Tentative indication of possible panels. We do not require a full list of panels, nor a list of paper titles or participants, but we would like at least 3 suggested themes for a 5-panel proposal and 6 suggested themes for a 10-panel proposal, which would show what the Section convenor(s) hope would be covered by the section at the conference.

 

The closing date for section proposals is midnight (24:00 CET) on 20 November 2018.

Contact info: programme@eisapec19.org

Dr. Juha A. Vuori
Professor of International Politics
Faculty of Management
University of Tampere
Finland

Dr. Saara Särmä
Researcher
National Defence University
Finland