International Studies Association Conference - Memories, Narratives and Translation

          I attended a panel entitled “Memories, Narratives and Translation: Gender, Nation and (Post-) Conflict” at the International Studies Association conference on the 3^rd of April, 2013.  The panel was fascinating and surprisingly cohesive, given that the speakers’ topics ranged from the intricacy of differing memories of conflicts to post-disaster drawing projects.  First, the speakers presented their papers (and/or projects) in an 8 min speed-through.  Then Professor Wibben offered critiques and compliments of their papers.  Then the panel was opened up for questions and discussion.  This format allowed the audience to get a glimpse of the individual projects but the purpose seemed more to facilitate connection and discussion between the panelists and other academics in the audience. 

            Some common themes included: silencing, and the subtle but serious difference between staying silent and being silenced, examining survivors of sexualized violence as whole, complex beings, not just “rape victims,” and of course, debate about the topic of the connected series of panels; feminist security studies, and how they differ from traditional IR security studies.

            One panelist stuck out to me in particular: Sungju Park-Kang (see link at bottom of post.)  “Fictional IR” is a term that this scholar has coined to cover as he says, “all of IR, really.”  By “fictional IR” he is referring to the methods all scholars employ when looking at data, and inventing a narrative that connects the data points.  No matter how well-researched, or how massive the amount data one can gather concerning a particular event, one can never truly step inside the shoes of another human, never really understand how they were feeling or exactly what their motivations were.  So in a very real way, all “history” is, actually, “fictional.”  This is especially true when one is writing about a culture or time period dissimilar to one’s own, because one must do a great deal of projecting, a great deal of imagining to understand why a person from that culture or time period performed their actions in the precise manner that they did. 

Perhaps it is a slightly obtuse concept, but I found it to be an extremely helpful framework for analyzing the concept of the “feminist narrative” which we have referred to so often in our course.  As per my understanding, a feminist narrative approach to research involves paying attention to and documents the narratives that have been dismissed by more traditional and male-centric researchers, and then analyzing those narratives to broaden and often critic the formerly uncontested narrative of “what happened.”  Park-Kang’s theory of Fictional IR helps me to compare traditional and feminist narratives in order to draw my own nuanced conclusions.

http://www.globalstudies.gu.se/english/staff/park-kang/