Talk description:

The field of International Relations (IR) has been built upon the notions of rationalism, realism, and aspiration for empiricism. Most of the mainstream, positivist IR approaches and theories assume that one of the most inherent, crucial traits of the world of politics and security (and the tools for its examination) is rationality. Since the era of Enlightenment upon which our current understanding of science still rests, we often assume one ultimate answer, one ultimate truth about the world, which also applies to the world of politics.

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The concept of rationality is heavily gendered. We often think about emotions as the opposite of rationality, or rather as a deviation from rationality. It is no coincidence that we assume emotions to be feminine virtue. We do not talk about emotions very often in the field of international relations and international politics. We often exclude them from our search for “the truth” about politics and security because emotions are hard to define and most importantly, hard to calculate and replicate.

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In her talk, Anna Kotvalová will explore emotions in the world of politics from a feminist perspective and argue for the deconstruction of the dichotomy of emotions/rationality, private/public.

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Additionally, she will explore post-structuralist methodology which investigates emotions in IR through its representations (discourse, images, and texts) suggesting that we can understand emotions to be part of social power structures and treat them as such. 

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