Research Methods in Critical Security Studies, 2nd Edition

33 Sonic encounters in critical security studiesReflections from ethnographic fieldwork in Morocco

Michelle D. Weitzel

DOI: 10.4324/9781003108016-38

Introduction

Emergent International Relations (IR) literature on affect, emotion, and the somatic body has made strides in highlighting the central role of feeling in critical security studies and politics, calling into question purely cerebral forms of rationalism and complicating theories of action premised exclusively on verbal language. There are numerous challenges inherent to this research program. One centers on the methodological (and indeed, epistemological) difficulty of pinning down empirically something as ethereal and seemingly changeable as “feelings.” Another lies in tracing observable, ...