Papers by Stefanie Fishel
The Microbial State, 2017
This chapter uses the posthuman to envision a creative identity based on complexity and cooperati... more This chapter uses the posthuman to envision a creative identity based on complexity and cooperation, rather than the transcendent, unilinear arguments based on natural selection. In these metaphors, the ontology supported is one that renders multiple agents as worthy of care and regard by understanding the place of difference—not as threatening, but necessary.
The Microbial State, 2017
I left no one at the door, I invited all; The thief, the parasite, the mistress—these above all I... more I left no one at the door, I invited all; The thief, the parasite, the mistress—these above all I called— —Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass International Relations needs a bigger vocabulary. This claim does not mean that we need a more specialized language or theoretical jargon, but rather new words and concepts that explain the world with greater clarity. It means, as in the epigraph by Whitman above, we open our door to those who have been excluded or ignored at both a disciplinary level and a worldly one. We can invite guests from other disciplines or redraw the intellectual history of International Relations (IR) and reuse it for a new era of global or, more hopefully, planetary politics. This could begin simply with giving up the title “International Relations.” This discipline and the world it explains are more than, and less than, relations between nations. The familiar IR view of states and their corresponding nations obfuscates the challenges facing human communities in what ...
The Microbial State
The materiality of the body is introduced as a way to provide methodological insight into both th... more The materiality of the body is introduced as a way to provide methodological insight into both the way the body works, and by analogy how society works. This includes an expansion and redefinition of the political lexicon of body politics, and an attempt to tie self-interest to supporting an enriched and complex idea of community.
Review of International Studies
Forest ecosystems are crucial to survival on Earth. This article argues that trees and forests ar... more Forest ecosystems are crucial to survival on Earth. This article argues that trees and forests are both vital components of a healthy Earth system and productive examples for expanding International Relations’ disciplinary boundaries. The article discusses the forest in three contexts: the global, the (post)colonial, and from the tree itself. From tree planting as a practice of social and environmental justice, to postcolonial and Indigenous science and knowledge, to the mycorrhizal ‘wood wide web’, a focus on trees, forests, and biosphere opens the possibility for a multispecies IR. Through a consideration of trees and forests in law, treaty, culture, and science at the local and global level, this article adds to a growing literature in IR that strives to bring the non-human, more-than-human, or other-than-human creatively and productively into the discipline. Foregrounding the forest's materiality and trees’ symbolic power for human cultures opens important pathways to unders...
The Microbial State, 2017
This chapter will return how metaphors work, rather than what they are for, and reiterate that th... more This chapter will return how metaphors work, rather than what they are for, and reiterate that the engagement with metaphor and materialism is less about defining a new approach than it is concerned with bringing ontological and ethical commitments grounded in particular framings of the world to the fore in the study of IR.
Contemporary Political Theory, 2020
Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2017
Since the article ‘Planet Politics: A Manifesto from the End of IR’ (hereafter the Manifesto) was... more Since the article ‘Planet Politics: A Manifesto from the End of IR’ (hereafter the Manifesto) was published in 2016, it has provoked discussion and debate in multiple forums.2 Sessions have been dedicated to it at the 2016 European Workshop on International Studies on ‘Politics in the Anthropocene’, the R.J. Vincent Colloquium at the Australian National University, the Oceanic Conference on International Studies in Brisbane, in two roundtables at the 2017 ISA in Baltimore, and this October at the Earth System Governance Conference. In May 2017, Joseph Camilleri dedicated a web forum with 12 contributors to the question, ‘Can world politics save planet Earth?’3 The 2017 Millennium Conference drew another reference in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s keynote. These
Cuizine: The Journal of Canadian Food Cultures, 2018
This article explores the power of food and fermentation as a situated and material way for women... more This article explores the power of food and fermentation as a situated and material way for women and feminist communities to come together for change and sustenance. Fermentation processes, when understood as a microbial process, can aid in imagining a feminist political project of transformation that begins in the kitchen, and it can be a powerful metaphor for rethinking politics and equality.
Critical Military Studies, 2015
Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2016
Planet Politics is about rewriting and rethinking International Relations as a set of practices, ... more Planet Politics is about rewriting and rethinking International Relations as a set of practices, both intellectual and organisational. We use the polemical and rhetorical format of the political manifesto to open a space for inter-disciplinary growth and debate, and for thinking about legal and institutional reform. We hope to begin a dialogue about both the limits of IR, and of its possibilities for forming alliances and fostering interdisciplinarity that can draw upon climate science, the environmental humanities, and progressive international law to respond to changes wrought by the Anthropocene and a changing climate.
Critical Studies on Security, 2013
This article argues that the guidelines in the Responsibility to Protect, and the later findings ... more This article argues that the guidelines in the Responsibility to Protect, and the later findings of the High Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, do not substantively explore the problematic relationship between intrastate violence, the sovereign state, and humanitarian interventions relationship to war in the violence to which it is responding. Without looking at these complex relationships, international intervention for humanitarian purposes, as defined by the Responsibility to Protect, will not be able to truly answer sovereign intrastate violence, as it never fully identifies the processes that are producing that violence.
Millennium
The zombie, as a Western pop culture icon, has taken up residence in International Relations. Use... more The zombie, as a Western pop culture icon, has taken up residence in International Relations. Used both humorously and as a serious teaching tool, many scholars and professors of IR have written of the zombie as a useful figure for teaching IR theory in an engaging manner, and have used zombie outbreaks to analyse the responses of the international community during catastrophe, invasion, and natural disasters. The authors of this article would like to unearth another aspect of the zombie that is often left unsaid or forgotten: namely, that the body of the zombie, as a historical phenomenon and cultural icon, is deeply imbricated in the racialisation of political subjects and fear of the Other. Through a critical analysis of biopower and race, and in particular Weheliye’s concept of habeas viscus, we suggest that the figure of the zombie can be read as a racialised figure that can provide the means for rethinking the relationship of the discipline of IR to the concept of race. We rea...
This paper will review the main debates surrounding organ transfer and its potential to become ei... more This paper will review the main debates surrounding organ transfer and its potential to become either market or state controlled, and the medical response to the "shortage" of organs. It will argue that the highly medicalized and technocratic nature of organ procurement, transfer, ...
This chapter introduces ideas and metaphors from ecological immunity and biomedicine as a way to ... more This chapter introduces ideas and metaphors from ecological immunity and biomedicine as a way to illuminate the relationship between bodies and states. Rather than arguing that the state and the body should be separated, this chapter intervenes on this metaphorical relationship by enlivening our ideas of the “body” in the body politic.
Uploads
Papers by Stefanie Fishel