Textiling World Politics: Towards an extended epistemology, methodology, and ontology

Abstract

This article argues that textiling—a particular kind of making that simultaneously constitutes a concept, a metaphor, and a practice—can facilitate a radical rethinking and redoing of the study of world politics. Specifically, we suggest three ways in which textiling, and the relationality it enables, facilitates this innovation: as a different way of theorizing in the discipline of international relations (IR), as a creative method and methodology for the empirical study of world politics, and as ontological world-making through cosmopraxis. These three ways open up possibilities of engaging the world and its politics differently by enabling an extended epistemology that accounts not only for propositional (abstract and textual) knowledge, but also for experiential, presentational, and practical ways of knowing. Thereby, textiling is not only an innovative practical instrument by means of which different research traditions within IR can cultivate non-propositional ways of knowing; it can also entangle these new insights with the propositional knowledge traditionally privileged by IR and interweave theory and practice in IR scholarship.