Art as Thought: A Methods Manifesto for International Studies

Art is creative and critical, but too often, efforts to think about art as a site of politics have reduced artworks to illustrations of existing theories or conditions. To think with art is to think with artworks themselves: the materials, forms, techniques, esthetics, and political strategies that shape them and are, in turn, shaped by them.

Art as Thought is a methods manifesto. It calls for more substantive approaches to mobilizing art in international relations theory. We argue that art's formal and material characteristics ought to be addressed as thought and as modes of political theorizing. Art is creative and critical, but too often, efforts to think about art as a site of politics have reduced artworks to illustrations of existing theories or conditions. Writing with and seeking to push further the rich field of work associated with the Aesthetic Turn in international relations theory,  we write against instrumentalizing art in the service of theory. Our manifesto calls for scholars to stop using art as the interesting anecdote that opens an essay or as the deus ex machina that provides tidy and hopeful conclusions to analyses of complex problems. Instead, we call for thinking with art. To think with art is to think with artworks themselves: the materials, forms, techniques, esthetics, and political strategies that shape them and are, in turn, shaped by them.