Celebrating Twenty Years of British Gender and IR

Layered wanderings: epistemic justice through the art of Wangechi Mutu and Njideka Akunyili Crosby

“…As these artists demonstrate, art as a practice not only makes the international through the subjects it reproduces, but can share a queer epistemology that is important for understanding and studying international politics. Building on this claim and on a growing body of work on the politics of art within disciplinary international relations/world politics (Brocklehurst 1999;Sylvester 2005Sylvester , 2015Agathangelou and Ling 2009;Danchev and Lisle 2009;Moore and Shepherd 2010), particularly in relation to collage (Sylvester 2005;Zalewski et al 2009;Särmä 2015;Kangas et al 2018), I would like to call for the need to think through the ethics of "wanderings" (wonderings) and the power of "layerings" as part of queer epistemologies and their figurations, including thinking through what it means to reconfigure art along the decolonial lines that Mutu and Akinyili Crosby suggest.…”