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Everyday experience as IR theory
Arlene B. Tickner
Political Science Department
Universidad de los Andes,
Bogotá, Colombia
## email not listed ##
Paper presented at the ISA annual meeting
Honolulu, Hawaii , March 2-5, 2005
The role of everyday life in knowledge has a long history in Western and non-Western
social thought. Recognizing that theory is rooted in lived experience implies that
meaningful sense-making activities take place at all levels of social life, and are not
necessarily limited to what is normally defined as “authoritative practice” within a given
field of academic study. The existence of such everyday forms of theorizing leads to
important questions concerning what it means to know, who legitimately knows, where
knowers are situated, how certain issues achieve importance as objects of study, and what
the purpose of theory itself is (Sylvester 1996; Zalewski 1996).
Post-positivism in IR has made significant inroads in identifying the limitations of
positivist epistemology for critical social research. In particular, positivism’s embracement
of objectivity, neutrality and universalism has been blamed for legitimizing hegemonic
strains of discourse, and marginalizing others, thus reinforcing asymmetrical power
relations in international practice itself. Taking such accusations seriously has meant
recognizing the social positionality of knowledge, and acknowledging the importance of
worldviews that have been eclipsed and silenced by dominant knowledge projects and their
respective theories.
Historiographical and sociology of science interpretations of IR as an academic
field have sought to account for how authoritative knowledge about IR is produced from
within the discipline itself, thus introducing a considerable degree of sociological reflexivity
into the field that has enhanced understanding of how and why IR theorizing has evolved
as it has. However, sociological reflexivity has yet to be met with sufficient geocultural
reflexivity, consisting of greater awareness concerning how different social actors in distinct
locations think about global issues as a result of their particular lived experiences (Tickner
2003). Author critical IR scholars in general argue in favour of disciplinary opening in
order to include a wider array of (marginal) perspectives, how exactly this is too be
achieved within the limits of existing academic practice is a much fuzzier issue.
In this paper, I focus on one aspect of geocultural reflexivity that has often been
overlooked in IR scholarship, namely, the role of everyday experience in theory-building.
Making use of hermeneutics and sociological discussions of everyday life, I examine the
relationship between lived experience, understanding and knowledge. I then explore the
important contributions that both feminism and postcolonialism have made for thinking
about how the diverse geographical, social and historical loci of enunciation occupied by
different social actors in the world necessarily lead to multiple ways of understanding and
theorizing reality. Making use of these insights, I discuss academic practice as simply
another form of everyday experience in which specific ideas about knowledge and
membership constrain even the most well-intentioned attempts to tap into knowing that
occurs beyond the boundaries of a given field. I then look at the specific case of IR, and
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