Let’s be Strangers! Strange encounters as creative force in knowledge production

In their paper, Nicola Nymalm (University of Edinburgh and Visiting Research Fellow at the Stockholm Center for Global Asia) and Felix Berenskötter (King’s College London) consider how scholars can engage across intellectual boundaries as International Relations (IR) becomes increasingly fragmented.

Over the past two decades, mainstream theoretical approaches have lost ground as new frameworks have proliferated; the idea of “great debates” has faded; and the decline of US and Western hegemony has encouraged the development of “non-Western” alternatives. These shifts are opening up valuable new perspectives, but they can also lead scholars to retreat into intellectual comfort zones and engage mainly with audiences who share their approach.

The paper develops the concept of strangeness as a way to counter fragmentation without returning to the idea of a single universal framework. By making the familiar strange, encounters across intellectual boundaries can become a creative force in knowledge production. The speakers illustrate their approach through examples of conceptual encounters within Western IR, as well as between Western IR and East Asian IR, and consider the structural barriers to such encounters and how these might be overcome.

About the speakers
Nicola Nymalm is Lecturer in International Relations of East Asia at the University of Edinburgh and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Stockholm Center for Global Asia. Her research draws on critical approaches to International Relations, international political economy, security, and military studies. She is the author of From “Japan Problem” to “China Threat”? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of US Foreign Policy in the Indo-Pacific(Routledge, 2023). Felix Berenskötter is based at King’s College London.

Read the full description and sign up here. The paper will be sent to registered participants before the seminar.