Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Laura J. Shepherd is professor of international relations at the University of Sydney, Australia, and visiting senior fellow in the Centre for Women, Peace and Security at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Much of her research focuses on the United Nations Security Council’s Women, Peace and Security agenda, and attendant dynamics of gender, violence, and security governance. Laura is author or editor of many books, including, most recently, Narrating the Women, Peace and Security Agenda: Logics of Global Governance and New Directions in Women, Peace and Security (edited with Soumita Basu and Paul Kirby). Laura was elected president of the International Studies Association for a 2023–2024 term. She spends too much time on Twitter, where she tweets from @drljshepherd.Academia is a death cult and yet it saved her life, writes Laura Shepherd. This book returns the favors. With courage and meticulous precision, she investigates how academia causes her pain, dooms our profession, and inflicts death on the body politic. Her ceaseless searching and beautiful writing mean to change our profession so that we center grief, care, collaboration, and love. Laura writes this transformation via a profound humility, with exact excavations of uncertainty, and through the cultivation of fired hope. This work is a gift to be savored.
- Naeem Inayatullah, Ithaca College,
This book is a gift and an offering. With her characteristic care, feminist wisdom, and generosity, Laura Shepherd has crafted a book that accomplishes what the best stories do: The reader feels seen, held, gently prodded, and accompanied.
- Roxani Krystalli, University of St Andrews,
Drawing on a wide range of personal reflections, Laura Shepherd reveals—at times with brutal honesty—how everyday experiences have shaped her scholarly contributions that so many of us know and appreciate. The ensuing journey takes the reader back and forth between memoir, epistemology, and feminist politics.
- Roland Bleiker, University of Queensland,
Laura Shepherd’s personal narratives are not contained by a what—“British,” “middle class white woman,” “scholar,” or any other reified, inanimate object. Instead, her book reveals a who that, because it is made of entanglements, is unrepeatable, relational, indeterminate, plural, and political. This journeying self reaches inside and outside, staying with us as she walks away from the spotlight so the reader can become present and visible within the story. As a result, the encounter with Laura is nurturing, healing, illuminating, and freeing. This is political narrative at its best.
- Paulo Ravecca, Editor of Journal of Narrative Politics,
Outlining her emotional quagmires with stunning precision, Shepherd enables an alternative register for political writing: one where the admission of anxieties and discomfort can be the starting-point for intimate yet transformative encounters with the self and the world. The book offers a dwelling place for anyone trying to inhabit the discipline while retaining other ways of being in (and with) the world. Overall, Shepherd offers a hesitant but embodied roadmap of how to continue living and imagining. In a sense, the book is a feminist love letter and a reminder that we can love something fiercely enough; to hold it, shamelessly reimagine it and let it go when it no longer holds us.
International Affairs
This open access book is an autoethnographic reflection on the value in the act of writing, illuminating the life of the researcher—in particular the researcher as human. Shepherd explores the multitudes of the academic, feminist self through expanding vocabularies of how scholars, researchers, writers, teachers, and academics can make sense of their worlds.
At the intersection of international relations theory and the personal, Shepherd presents seven reflexive essays on aspects of being and knowing as she has encountered them. The essays are grounded in and inspired by her experiences as a way of asking readers to imagine how knowledge production in the social sciences might look different if we could create and hold space for different ways of writing, being, and knowing. The disciplining practices which produce our limited modes of academic expression can be encountered otherwise. She calls on us to reflect on academic subjectification across the interconnected spaces we simultaneously inhabit and produce.
The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by University of Sydney
The Self, and Other Stories lies at the intersection of IR and the personal. Through seven reflexive essays, Shepherd explores themes of writing as a way of being and knowing, but also as a necessary form of self-expression in contemporary academia.
Preface
Acknowledgements
1. Exegesis
2. Expertise
3. Encounter
4. Engagement
5. Experience
6. Entanglements
7. Epilogue
About the Author
OPEN ACCESS
Publication in open access of the book The Self, and Other Stories by Laura J. Shepherd is funded by The University of Sydney, Australia.
- An autoethnographic exploration of being and knowing
- Presents seven essays organized around core concepts and themes related to knowledge and subjectivity
- Reflects on the politics of contemporary academia
- Includes original poetry and photography
The landscape of contemporary global politics is complex and oftentimes violent. Yet the urgency to provide solutions or immediate practical actions to this violence oftentimes leads to inadequate knowledge. This is despite the abundance of theoretical, conceptual and methodological tools available – much of this produced through conventional academic disciplines, notably International Relations, Political Theory, and Philosophy. But the constraints imposed on these traditional disciplines profoundly limit their ability to incorporate and make effective use of more creative and innovative methodologies found in other disciplines and genres. This series provides a unique opportunity to offer creative intellectual space to work with an eclectic and rich range of disciplines and approaches including performative methodologies, storytelling, narrative and auto-ethnography, embodied research methodologies, participant research, visual and film methodologies, and arts-based methodologies.
Series Editors: Shine Choi, Cristina Masters, Swati Parashar, and Marysia Zalewski