Research Institute for Social
Sciences
Epistemologies of the Political, the Global and the International
A workshop to reflect collectively on the ways we know the ‘factual’ world we research.
Co-hosted by the Emerging Securities Research Unit, Keele University and the BISA Poststructuralist
Politics Working Group
Keynote speaker: Prof Michael Shapiro, University of Hawaii at Manoa
Monday 7 November 2011
Keele University, Claus Moser Building, 9:30 – 5:00
Rationale
Orders of the real are authoritative ways of imagining the world. They imply specific sets of beliefs,
attitudes, practices, and discourses that taken together constitute regimes of truth around which
decisions on what is to be taken as valid are made. Orders of the real presuppose understandings of
how the world is known, the relations that constitute the regimes upon which knowledge is
produced, and assumptions about the problem Being in the world. Although within a positivist
tradition of science they have been approached from the realm of ‘the empirical’ and observed
through methods that seek to reduce them to objective and measurable facts, they are far more
problematic than that. As continental thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Nancy, and many
others have demonstrated, they enshrine complex relations of power, that include, and transcend,
what has been known through and after Foucault as power/knowledge.
Orders of the real constitute epistemological problems. They can be observed as sites from which to
question deep assumptions that determine the outcomes of research. They can also be explored to
make explicit the conditions of possibility and operability of systems of thought upon which modern
technologies of governance depend. They can also be used to interrogate problems that in principle
appear buried in time, such as relationships between the modern and the secular as well as the
modern and the uncertain, within technologies and practices of government and rule.
Since its inception in 2001, the BISA Poststructuralist Working Group has intended to promote
thinking on the wider problem of politics inspired by so-called postructuralist thinkers. The Emerging
Securities Unit was created in 2009 to support research on novel forms of protecting ways of being
in the world. Through this joint workshop we intend to offer a space for critical reflection on the
epistemological implications of researching the political, the global, and the international from any
form of poststructuralist perspective.
Format
The workshop is organised in the form of interventions to a general debate. We are calling for
participants who wish to reflect publicly on the epistemological implications of their own projects.
We invite abstracts on these interventions of no more than 300 words drawing on, but not
exclusively, the following questions:

How do we research epistemologies and what is the purpose of doing so?

How can we advance understandings of the political, the global, and the international in
researching epistemologies within the wider study of Politics and International Relations?

What sense does it make to prioritise, or emphasize, research at the epistemological level in
comparison with ontologies and teleologies?

What does researching the epistemologies of the political, the global, and the international
offer in terms of understanding the realm of the empirical?
Please send abstracts to Corey Walker Mortimer (c.b.walker-mortimer@ilpj.keele.ac.uk) by the 29th
of July 2011
Accepted participants will be asked to write a 1000-word brief on their intervention to be included
on a report of the workshop which will be hosted at the Emerging Securities Research Group
website.
Costs of participation: A contribution of £10 per participant will be used to subsidise travel for PhD
students. Participants will pay for their own lunch.
Organisers: Luis Lobo-Guerrero (l.lobo-guerrero@intr.keele.ac.uk), Peter Adey
(p.adey@esci.keele.ac.u), and Barry Ryan (b.j.ryan@intr.keele.ac.uk), on behalf of the Emerging
Securities Unit. Martin Coward (BISA PP-WG) and Emily Jackson (BISA PPWG and Emerging Securities
Unit)
Event coordinator: Corey Walker Mortimer (c.b.walker-mortimer@ilpj.keele.ac.uk)
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