Fairy Tales and International Relations

Starnes, Kathryn

doi:10.4324/9781315521978

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…The section begins by arguing that while much IR literature denies children meaningful agency in world politics, important recent work has begun to emerge on the capacity of children and their books to problematise and disturb common-sense understandings of the world. 31 A second section then migrates this claim to a wider literature on popular culture's theoretical capacity to produce and rupture knowledge of the world through its question-raising sensibilities.…”

Section: Children Culture and World Politicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…41 In this vein, Starnes uses fairy tales as both method and methodology to expose the taken-for-granted assumptions underpinning sixty IR textbooks. 42 Relatedly, J. Jack Halberstam, drawing on SpongeBob SquarePants, argues that children's popular culture is especially susceptible to non-hegemonic or subversive readings, in part because children are less imprinted by socialised expectations and more likely to engage in fantasy and play. 43 As fields beyond IR demonstrate, in short, there is therefore real value to engaging with such texts, their contexts and potentialities, and thereby moving beyond 'misguided and sentimental notion[s] of childhood innocence … or naive investment in the idea of truth issuing from the mouths of babes' .…”

Section: Children and Irmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Oh help! Oh no! The international politics of The Gruffalo: Children’s picturebooks and world politics

Jarvis

Robinson

2023

Rev. Int. Stud.

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The article explores the complicity of children’s picturebooks in the construction and critique of world politics. Focusing on The Gruffalo, it argues that this spectacularly successful book: (1) stories the international as a pessimistic, anarchical world populated by self-interested, survival-seekers; (2) disrupts this reading and its assumptions through evocation of the social production of threat; and, (3) provides a more fundamental decolonial critique of the international through parochial privileging of its protagonist’s journey through a ‘deep dark wood’. In doing this, we argue, the book vividly demonstrates the world’s susceptibility to multiple incompatible readings, while rendering visible the assumptions, framing, and occlusions of competing understandings of the international. As such, it theorises both world politics and knowledge thereof as contingent and unstable. In making this argument, three contributions are made. First, empirically, we expand research on popular culture and world politics through investigating a surprisingly neglected example of the former. Second, theoretically, we demonstrate the work such texts perform in (re)creating and (de)stabilising (knowledge of) global politics. Third, we offer a composite methodological framework for future research into the context, content, and framing of complex texts like The Gruffalo.

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Section: Children Culture and World Politicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Children and Irmentioning

confidence: 99%

Oh help! Oh no! The international politics of The Gruffalo: Children’s picturebooks and world politics

Jarvis

Robinson

2023

Rev. Int. Stud.

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“…Antonio Gramsci (1971) observed that while teachers have the function of ‘educator’, we are engaged in educational relationships in all aspects of life. In consequence, there is a constant, ongoing tension between the sedimentations of knowledge that have accumulated across our own biographies compared to those of our students – especially the more specialised forms of knowledge embodied in our (long-standing) practical activities as educators and as active participants in academic debate (see Starnes (2017) on the workings of disciplinary ‘canons’). This demands, paraphrasing Norman Denzin (2017), that tutors – the ‘experts’ – are willing to take risks when challenged by students and to move to these new generational beats (p. 14).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Moving to new generational beats: Lived experiences of capitalism, student-led (re)makings of knowledge, and the evolution of critical research agendas

Bruff

2021

Capital & Class

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Via a reflection on the evolution of a module on comparing capitalisms that I have been teaching for more than a decade, this article discusses the collective influence of new generations of students on how knowledge is (re)made. I deploy a conjunctural understanding of the term ‘generations’ in order to make sense of how students’ interpretations of the topics covered by the module have, across the 2010s, led me to increasingly question the field that was, in an earlier conjuncture, essential for my intellectual foundation and development. Their lived experiences of capitalism are more likely to be dominated by themes such as political, economic and social crises and conflicts, inequality, personal indebtedness and precarity, and in some cases activism. This has had profound and long-lasting effects on my teaching and research, discomfiting me in an ultimately beneficial way; most notably, through the recognition that future critical work on comparing capitalisms ought to move away from previous attempts to engage immanently with dominant, mainstream approaches and towards the articulation of a more confident, autonomous position. Hence, a key aspect of the development and evolution of critical research agendas occurs in and through educational exchanges in the seminar room.

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Framing the neoliberal canon: resisting the market myth via literary enquiry

Bruff

Starnes

2018

Globalizations

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There is widespread recognition that neoliberal rhetoric about 'free markets' stands in considerable tension with 'really existing' neoliberalizing processes.However, the oft-utilized analytical distinction between 'pure' economic and political theory and 'messy' empirical developments takes for granted that neoliberalism, at its core, valorizes free markets. In contrast, the paper explores whether neoliberal intellectuals ever made such an argument. Using FriedrichHayek and Milton Friedman as exemplars, our reading of canonical neoliberal texts focuses on author framing gestures, particular understandings of the term 'science', techniques of characterization, and constructions of epistemological legitimacy. This enables us to avoid the trap of assuming that these texts are about free markets and instead enquires into their constitution as literary artefacts. As such, we argue that the remaking of states and households rather than the promotion of free markets is at the core of neoliberalism. Our analysis has significant implications. For example, it means that authoritarian neoliberalism is not a departure from but actually more in line with the 'pure' neoliberal canon than in the past. Therefore, neoliberalism ought to be critiqued not for its rhetorical promotion of free markets but instead for seeking to reorganize societies in coercive, non-democratic and unequal ways. This also enables us to acknowledge that households are central to resistance to neoliberalism as well as to the neoliberal worldview itself.Bruff & Starnes -Framing the Neoliberal Canon 2

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Fairy Tales and International Relations

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Oh help! Oh no! The international politics of The Gruffalo: Children’s picturebooks and world politics

Oh help! Oh no! The international politics of The Gruffalo: Children’s picturebooks and world politics

Moving to new generational beats: Lived experiences of capitalism, student-led (re)makings of knowledge, and the evolution of critical research agendas

Framing the neoliberal canon: resisting the market myth via literary enquiry

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