At Work with Practice Theory,‘Failed’ Fieldwork,or How to See International Politics in An Empty Chair

Abstract

IR practice theorists advocate studying international relations through its manifold practices. On the question of methodology, they thus promote a simple slogan: start with practices! But how do we first capture an international practice? Surprisingly, this crucial question often remains abstract or hidden in methodological metaphors like ‘leaving the armchair’. Reflecting on a supposedly failed fieldwork experiment, I introduce two heuristics in this article on how to make this hidden work transparent. In particular, I argue that capturing practice happens through abductive movements between site, scrap, screen, and seminar work that is similarly enabled and constrained by practical, epistemic, professional, and political positionalities. Using this vocabulary will advance IR practice research in three ways: first, pedagogically, in transferring a more accurate impression of what the approach entails; second, normatively, in accounting for where our arguments come from; and third, epistemically, to avoid only seeing what we were looking for.

Introduction

This article seeks to inject a new dose of reflexivity into the IR ‘practice turn’ by taking a close look at its own craft. As a research programme, IR’s turn to practice has advanced considerably over the last two decades, not least in the pages of this Journal. ¹ While much early scholarship was focused on defending its ontological object, a nuanced debate has since developed on the best ways to define, study, and theorise practice in IR. The central claim connecting a ‘diverse ensemble of thinkers’ is to turn to practice as the smallest unit of analysis to thicken analyses of global politics by addressing how it is lived, performed, and experienced. ²

Twenty years into its turn, practice has become a conceptual magnet for IR scholars interested in the everyday, the informal and the mundane; and has produced innovative scholarship putting forward relational, processual, and performative understandings of the international. ³ The debate is well advanced on the theoretical level and practice theory has successfully written itself into the discipline’s text(book)s. Here, its focus on bodily movements, shared and tacit knowledge and material mediation sets it apart from both rationalist-individualist and structuralist-systemic accounts. In the landscape of ‘IR Theory’ and its ‘-isms’, ‘practice theory’ sits close to Constructivism in its self-understanding as a meta-theoretical approach or sensibility rather than a single theoretical school. Like most constructivist scholarship, practice theory takes ‘theory’ as offering ‘sensitizing concepts’ rather than prescriptive demands. Indeed, some scholars have called practice theory the ‘new constructivism’. ⁴ This placement is contested by others, however, who see attention to practice not as an extension or complement to other IR frameworks, but as the original ‘glue’ of the discipline that cuts across IR’s multiple theoretical traditions, even if under different names. ⁵ Crucial for the current discussion is the similarity to constructivist takes on ‘theory’ as providing a framework that tells the researcher where to look (at practices) but that remains ‘empty’ until it is applied and filled with empirical analysis. ‘Practice theory’, in effect, ‘cannot be written first and operationalised later; it can only emerge through engagement with the phenomenon’. ⁶ Doing theory, or theorising, thus becomes a practice in itself. This understanding leaves practice scholars sceptical of much of IR’s detached scholasticism. ⁷ Instead, they argue for bringing debates on the nature and form of the international ‘down to the ground’ to ‘empirically scrutinize the process whereby certain competent performances produce effects of a world political nature’. ⁸ Such performances cannot be known in the abstract, and ‘scrutinizing’, or, as other leading voices put it, ‘framing’, ‘recovering’, ‘reconstructing’, or ‘capturing’ them becomes the main research task of the practice theorist. ⁹

But how do we do this? How does one recover or capture a practice? Unpacking this part of the research process is the main contribution of this article. Somewhat ironically, discussions of how to actually conduct practice research often remain abstract or black-boxed in methodological metaphors. ¹⁰ Following Iver Neumann, many practice theorists urge us to ‘leave the armchair’ and seek proximity to (the world of) practice. ¹¹ Once out, most advocate working according to ‘ethnographic’ and ‘inductive logics’ and map interpretations, objects, and ways of knowing through on-site contextualisation. ¹² This is the best strategy, it is claimed, as ‘practices are 100% observable, publicly available and concrete – but just not framed as such yet’. ¹³ Observing practice is considered straightforward, even ‘very easy’, as ‘bodily movements and artefacts are often readily accessible and directly observable’. ¹⁴ All the researcher needs to do is ‘observe, watch, listen, and record’. ¹⁵ This part of the research process is generally accounted for in descriptions of doing fieldwork, conducting interviews, reading documents, or visiting archives. But then it gets ‘tricky’, ¹⁶ as practice theorists are not only interested in describing how people move or use artefacts. They want to know what moving around or using an artefact means and how it is – potentially – implicated in shaping international relations. This part of the research process is ‘quite intricate’ ¹⁷ as it involves turning implicit knowledge into explicit knowledge and moving from the observation of action to the framing of practice.

This article develops a reflexive vocabulary to face and engage this ‘trickiness’. It proceeds in five parts. My entry point is a confrontation with ‘failure’ following a fieldwork experiment in which I managed to observe a practice but failed to interpret it as such. Experiment here refers to a collegial moment of epistemic and methodological curiosity rather than the more positivistic idea of a ‘field experiment’. ¹⁸ Part two retells the story of this experiment in four vignettes. They form the ‘empirics’ of the article as an experience-near example of what IR practice research may look like. The third part stars to open the black-box of the research process and discusses the different kinds of work I did to capture practice. Heuristically, I differentiate between site work, scrap work, screen work, and seminar work. Acknowledging this multiplicity pushes the article to look deeper into questions of positionality in part four, where I suggest that there are at least three dimensions of positionality involved in capturing practice. I call them practical, epistemic, and professional positionality. In part five, I bring the two heuristics together to argue that working with practice theory does not happen via neat inductive steps but abductive movements ¹⁹ across the dynamics and politics of one’s research – a state I refer to as political positionality. Throughout, I ground my discussion in the particular example of the practice of ‘empty chairing’ someone at a conference. For the sake of transparency, providing a complete theorisation of this practice is neither the ambition nor the focus of this article. Instead, I ‘zoom-in’ ²⁰ on the first, embodied steps of theory-making by tracing how I came to capture empty chairing by linking direct observations (a row of chairs) to tacit interpretations (chairs doing politics). ‘Practice’ thus shows up in multiple, interrelated ways in this article: as an approach to IR (‘practice theory’), as describing political activities (‘empty chairing’), and as a way to trace our own methodological movements (‘at work with practice theory’). ²¹

Overall, I argue that taking seriously the claim that theorising practice resembles a practice itself means that we have to approach it according to the same conceptual standards. This means accepting that it has observable and tacit dimensions, is emergent and malleable, and can be performed more or less competently. Theorising international practices, in other words, intersects with practicing International Relations. The heuristics I introduce offer a reflexive vocabulary to account for this intersection. On the one hand, foregrounding our ‘hidden work’ increases the transparency and pedagogical value of IR practice research. On the other hand, and indeed relevant far beyond methodological discussions, it shows the negative epistemic and normative implications of doing un-reflexive work. In the example below, this comes out in the tension of not (yet) being able to see a practice, and the risk of only seeing what one is looking for. If we don’t reflect on our own practice, we risk missing aspects of IR that may be performed right in front of our eyes or indeed that we ourselves are implicated in. This is not to say that reflexivity promises ‘success’ to see everything or normative innocence. Rather, it gives us a way to account for what is (not) possible for us to see, and thus produce ‘open knowledge’ with the potential to inspire and teach, in contrast to ‘secretive knowledge’ that risks being exclusionary and dogmatic. ²²

Failure? A New Dose of Reflexivity

IR practice theorists argue that international relations can be known through its manifold practices. On the question of methodology, they thus promote a simple slogan: start with practices! But how does one find a practice to start from?

If you want to understand a scientific approach, Clifford Geertz argued some 50 years ago, ‘you should look in the first instance not at its theories or its findings. . .you should look at what the practitioners of it do’. ²³ While Geertz’s suggestion nicely describes the substantive focus of practice-theoretical work, it also captures what practice theorists call the ‘symmetry’ of their approach: that doing (social) science research, including IR, is itself a social practice. ²⁴ This article explores the methodological implications of this symmetry claim. My motivation to do so comes out of a supposedly ‘failed’ fieldwork experiment in the spring of 2019 when I was invited to attend a diplomatic meeting to provide an ‘extra set of eyes’ to observe the room. Experiment here stands for an open-ended and curiosity driven approach to research; in this case an attempt to try out the possibilities and promises of ethnographic observation in IR. Rather than thinking of experimentation as interventionist research of measuring or manipulating a controlled environment, the fieldwork exercise was an experiment in observational method, loosely based on an implicit expectation that we could generate a fuller – potentially better – understanding of what happens at diplomatic meetings if we added multiple observers. ²⁵ Yet, according to a fellow practice theorist and insider to the field, I managed to observe ‘all the wrong things’. To my colleague, ²⁶ the shortcomings were especially evident in how I interpreted a row of empty chairs. Where I saw spots to sit, he saw international politics.

This mismatch points to the problem of naïve empiricism, acknowledged by practice theorists in their arguments that practice is more than ‘people doing stuff’ and that studying practice must include getting at competence and tacit knowledge as to how and why things are done in a certain way. ²⁷ In methodological terms, it points to the old challenge of relating observations and interpretations, ²⁸ and the basic idea in reflexive (IR) epistemologies that knowledge production is always ‘situated’. ²⁹ It also exemplifies what practice scholars refer to as the ‘indexicality’ of practice: that the meaning of practice is dependent on ‘socially organized occasions of its use’. ³⁰ This idea bears resemblance to how post-structuralist IR scholars have approached the study of texts. Putting forward the concept of intertextuality they argue that the meaning of a text is ‘never fully given by the text itself but is always a product of other readings and interpretations’. ³¹ The same applies to practice – which are ‘intrinsically ambiguous and open-ended’ and should be studied not through attempts to locate meaning ‘in some determinable centre’, but according to a decentring logic that ‘entails questioning of how meanings are constructed and imposed, and this necessarily involves the issue of power’. ³² While a rich theoretical debate about indexicality is unfolding among IR practice scholars who trace its implications in substantive research on hierarchy, normativity, or change; ³³ the debate is less advanced at the methodological level, symptomatically readable from my colleague’s reference to ‘failure‘. Perhaps involuntarily, the latter resembles an attempt to ‘tame’ the unruliness of practice by implicitly assuming that there was one correct version of events to be observed. ³⁴

In the spirit of treating ‘failure’ as something to think with, ³⁵ I use this experience as a starting point to consider the methodological challenges of researching indexical doings, and the broader implications linked to them, such as the transparency and trustworthiness of this research. This is important, as any discussion of how to capture practice is incomplete without a concern of how to capture it ‘well’ (or at least not ‘all wrong’). Zooming-in on the experiment allows me to do that. Taking the reader into the field, my body, and my mind, the ambition is to remove black-boxing metaphors from methodological discussions and to normalise its specificities and contingencies. I do this not to romanticise practice-research’s research-practice, but to inspire reflection and critique.

Speaking of critique, none of this is not to say that reflexive considerations are absent in the practice turn, ³⁶ but to say that they can be engaged more fully. Indeed, practice theoretical scholarship is among IR’s most methodologically explicit, and key studies often include detailed appendices discussing research designs or interview questions. ³⁷ What remains hidden, however, are records covering ‘the distance’ between design, data generation and theorisations, as well as insights into the position and role of the practice theorist herself. ³⁸ Following Hamati-Ataya, this article seeks to further highlight the inherently normative and positional nature of practice research as one of IR’s increasingly popular ‘modes of theorizing’, and to do that not only at an abstract, meta-theoretical level (reflexivity matters) but by showing the ‘importance and practical meaning of ‘reflexivity’ for empirical IR’ (how reflexivity matters). ³⁹ The extra dose of reflexivity this article offers lies in making explicit how what we do when we work with practice theory is implicated in the epistemic claims we can make. A similar point has been made by Cecile and Iver Neumann, who argue that IR scholars are well aware of their positionalities, but ‘treat the minutia of situatedness. . .as obvious, small fry, beneath their dignity’, resulting in ‘suboptimal data production and non-situated books and articles’. ⁴⁰ The point of ‘foregrounding minutiae’ is not to ‘confess’ or use positionality to relativise arguments but to show how what we do is directly linked to what we make known. ⁴¹ In the abstract, leading practice theorists have called this the ‘bundling up’ of theory and method; ⁴² in the particular example of the fieldwork experiment, it shows the bundling up of the knowledge I produced with the work I produced it from.

There are at least three benefits of adding this level of transparency to how we do practice research. First, it contributes to important work done within and outside of the academy to show the social, institutional, and professional hierarchies that make academia a political field just like those we study. ⁴³ Working in this field does not happen in an epistemic or normative vacuum, which – as I will show – can directly influence how we make sense of IR. Second, it fits into current debates on data transparency and the rising pressure for interpretive scholars to publish fieldnotes along with papers. As we will see, this demand obscures the assumption that observations are ‘raw data’ equally collectable and interpretable by anyone. ⁴⁴ Finally, it extends a pedagogical invitation to speak more openly about our own craft. As practice theory is making its way into the mainstream of the discipline, more and more students are interested in working with it. Since the approach draws legitimacy from having engaged with the world of practice, unpacking this engagement is crucial, especially in a discipline that is not immune to its own norms and politics (where do researchers come from, who does research on what, what gets published, etc.) but still seeks to make global arguments. ⁴⁵ While reflexivity does not present a way out of situatedness, it strengthens the responsibility and credibility of our arguments by acknowledging where they come from. ⁴⁶

Empty Chairs and the Capture of an International Practice

Tuesday

I feel a drop of sweat on my forehead as I lean over to lock my bike in the parking lot. It’s late spring and my hair sticks to my neck as I take off my helmet. It’s fine, I think, no one will pay much attention to me. The first entrance I choose to get into the old brick building is the wrong one. The second works. It leads me through a set of glass doors and up a carpeted staircase into the foyer of a chandelier-lit ballroom. I am here to participate in a strategy meeting of a group of international diplomats that one of my academic colleagues organised. I didn’t manage to read the documents he sent me last week and feel substantially unprepared. Maybe that’s okay. I am not so much here to follow the content but to help observe what happens at the meeting, practically speaking. My being here comes out of a chat we had the other week that it could be fun to ‘experiment’ with ethnographic observation methods by attending events in each other’s fields and provide an extra set of eyes.

To enter the foyer, I walk past the registration desk. Before I can say my name, the woman sitting behind it hands me a plastic badge displaying my name. She works as an administrator at the university where we talk from time to time. Thanks, I say, and see my colleague as I pull the neck-sling over my head. I walk over. He greets me with a nod and a short ‘you okay?’ I reply something mechanical and am introduced to his co-organiser with a one-sides introduction of her first name and no introduction of mine. I say my name and she asks about my academic work. I pinch my eyes. I didn’t expect her to know anything about me. As the foyer fills up with people, we talk about our research, fieldwork methods, and the event today. I ask what the point of this meeting is. The point is to discuss the report and improve it before it goes to the next meeting, she replies. So, you are helping us observe today, she continues before I can ask what that means. Yes, I say. What exactly are you going to focus on? she pushes. I pause. I will just observe and take some notes if that’s okay–? Sounds good she says, winks, and adds just go and do your magic. I smile. She smiles. And we walk off in opposite directions.

I walk to the back of the ballroom and sit down in the last of eight rows of slim, dark-red leather chairs. This row is the only one not covered in white copy papers that display names of countries and institutions in black bold print. Some of the print outs in the previous rows read DIIS, Somalia, and University of Oxford. Without an assigned positionality, I look around me and down at the floor. Finally, I put my bag down on one of the paperless chairs and venture back into the foyer for some coffee. Returning to my seat, two men follow me in and ask whether they can take two of the unassigned chairs. For sure, I say, and gesture to make space. Thanks so much, they say. As soon as they sit, my colleague walks over in long, quick steps. He grabs the man further away from me lightly by the arm and says in a low, soft voice no, no, why don’t you come with me and sit over here. They are not supposed to sit in unassigned seats, I assume, and help the one sitting next to me pick up his documents from the floor. I’ll see you later, he says and shrugs his shoulders as he walks to the front of the room. Some seconds later, a woman holding a teacup sits down next to me and spends the next two minutes looking at a video of a baby on her phone. She sounded American, but we didn’t speak more than to clarify the emptiness of the unassigned chair. Over the next nine hours, I take 57-pages of jottings in my notebook, a frenetic scribbling that must look like I am taking notes on the content of the meeting, like most others in the room. The easiness of being a participant observer in a conference setting, I will write in my fieldnotes at night. But did I manage to achieve what my colleagues were expecting; did I manage to do magic?

Wednesday

The next day, I email 13-tightly typed pages of fieldnotes to my colleagues by replying to an email thread called ‘Ethnographers’. Thanks for inviting me along to the event yesterday. It was an interesting – if exhausting – (field) day for me. I wrote up my jottings in the way that I always write up my fieldnotes: I split them up into three columns, one containing ‘pure’ observations, one containing reflective notes and one containing analytical notes. I left the latter two blank, but maybe you have something you want to fill in. . . It would be cool to meet and talk about this further. I click send. Half an hour later, I get a reply: Oh woah, thank you so much for this. Really look forward to read in detail and then perhaps meet next week to discuss? I hope attending this was an interesting experience, and would love to think about this more methodologically, both in terms of the boundaries between participant observations and action research, but also adding a reflexive loop through an additional observer. Sounds good, I reply, and we schedule a time to meet.

Two Weeks Later

I read the narrative you gave us, my colleague says as I sit down at the table of a sidewalk-bar close to the university. It was fascinating to see, he continues, that you somehow managed to observe all the wrong things. Especially the thing with the chairs, he says with a smile, referring to my detailed descriptions of the place-holder print outs. What about them, I ask. Slightly tilting his head he says – as if it was the most self-evident thing in the world – well, it’s the politics of the empty chair, of course. The what now, I ask, and am told that it is a standard practice in diplomatic settings to show all attendees who the delegates are that were invited but decided not to come through placing place-holder cards on chairs that will remain noticeably empty throughout the day. Fair enough, I say and feel my face turning red, embarrassed for not having known.

A Year Later

After the chat on the sidewalk, I went back to my own research, the diplomats went on to adopt their report, and the 13 pages of fieldnotes were filed away and not spoken of again. What does it mean that to my colleague I had observed ‘all the wrong things’? Over the next months, these words resonated in my mind as I reflected on my own (field)work, unsettled by the idea that I could be looking at all the wrong things. What had supposedly gone wrong the day in the ballroom made me anxious as the project I was otherwise working on also concerned diplomatic practice. Perhaps without explicit realisation, this anxiety pushed me to ‘zoom out’ ⁴⁷ and into abductively probing whether what I had learned about diplomacy that day was also happening in other field sites. Eventually, I tried to embrace this unsettlement and wrote a first (draft of this) article, which I presented in two university seminars. The feedback was mixed, and I momentarily paused working on the manuscript as I turned my attention to more pressing projects.

But the empty chair had a way of working itself back in. I started seeing it in other (field)sites and began referring to it as an example of an international practice that you could not know from just observing a site in my teaching. I also googled the empty chair as an object of politics. I learned that politicians could be empty chaired by opponents or the media, that the empty chair could be used as a rhetorical device to make monologues look like dialogues, and that it could resemble both an active and passive (aggressive) strategy to visualise absences. There even had been an ‘empty chair crisis’ in the mid-1960s in the field I study, EU diplomacy, when French President de Gaulle boycotted Council meeting by keeping his chair empty to show France’s dissatisfaction with a legislative proposal. I also kept talking about the experiment. I often saw a spark in colleagues’ eyes when I got to the pointe of the story, and one of my students reported that he saw empty chairing in a coursework field assignment. By next spring, my colleague was working with another researcher to do fieldwork in a similar site. The experiment came up only one more time when he told me that he had learned something from our ‘fieldwork failure’. To avoid this time around, he said hastily and while we were passing each other in the hallway one afternoon, he had now told his observer exactly what to look for.

Four Dimensions of Research Work

The vignettes above lay out the process that led to the capturing of a practice we may call ‘empty chairing’ someone at a conference. Importantly, they only indicate it from my perspective and that of the event organisers, not from the parties that did not show up. In this part of the article and the next, I re-trace this process along two heuristic dimensions: first, the different kinds of work I did; and second, the different positionalities I did it from. They highlight how doing research is itself a domain of practice and present a reflexive vocabulary to account for the challenge of studying indexical doings and their politics.

Site Work

Over the last two decades, doing ‘fieldwork’ has become a central element of IR’s methodological toolbox. Discussions in the literature are advancing fast on how to get (access) to IR’s various ‘fields’, and, indeed, are already beginning to question the concept’s usefulness again. ⁴⁸ Central to advancing this debate in recent years, IR practice theorists have turned to fieldwork to ‘get close’ and study the sites in which they expect international practices to show up. Our experiment is an example of an often-visited site: the diplomatic meeting. Given that we had been to such meetings before and will likely go back to them after, our experiment was based on the curious – but in retrospect methodologically naïve – assumption to ‘add another pair of eyes’ into the site and come out with a fuller picture of what happened.

It was naïve, as it assumed that any observer could simply be dropped on site to neatly collect and meaningfully report on its practices. This move mistook interpretation for observation and reduced the researcher to a mechanical collection device supposedly producing immediately meaningful ‘data’. ⁴⁹ In its spontaneity, it lays bare the often one-dimensional treatment of research methods in IR as tools to collect information without thinking about the questions of knowledge production linked to them. My colleague’s statement telling his new observer ‘exactly what to look for’ exemplifies how easily the contingencies of sense-making are side-lined or even closed down when we think about fieldwork primarily as a tool to ‘get data’. While this strategy may present a practical solution, it runs the risk of ‘only finding what we are looking for’, thus almost obscuring the aim of research altogether. ⁵⁰ It was also naïve as it assumed that there was a single version of observable events to begin with. As a result, the experiment looked like a failure because the extra pair of eyes, my eyes, did not help fulfil the intention but added extra layers of interpretive mess. ⁵¹

If we approach the experiment through the sensibility of above’s ‘trickiness’, however, it begins to look more like a success: Eventually, it was in the difference between our interpretations of a directly observable action that at least one practice from the room was captured or ‘gotten at’: the practice of empty chairing. Beyond re-stating the need for reflexivity to recognise the partiality of what one researcher can see, looking at it this way highlights how knowledge about international practices is not contained in ‘the field’. In this example, being on site allowed me to observe the practice, but it took a lot more work to capture and thus begin to theorise it.

Scrap Work

Often, key moments of sense-making and building academic arguments happen in non-linear cycles of scrap work in which we dig into the mess of generated materials and newly lay them out to see how they may hang together. The biggest pieces of ‘scrap’ came from my notebook and the 57-pages of jottings transformed into fieldnotes. Exhausted after a long day in the ballroom, I continued working until 10 pm, transcribing and tidying up my observations. Silently cursing myself for the time I needed to type them out, transforming jottings into fieldnotes was central for capturing the doings of the empty chairs. Not (yet) knowing that empty chairing was among the practices performed in the meeting, my notes provide a written account of how I experienced it. The notes ‘carried’ the practice of observation into the trickier stage of tacit knowledge and (shared) interpretation. ⁵²

Textualisation and the importance of writing is a key concern in the literature on ethnographic research but has not been explicitly discussed by IR practice theorists, or praxiographers. ⁵³ Awareness of how we write practice is important at all stages of the research process. Similar to debates on ‘writing culture’, ⁵⁴ writing practice is a distinct literary genre in which the researcher-as-writer carries not only the practice but also an important responsibility given her interest in foregrounding the habitual, unspoken, and tacit. Writing practice thus makes it accessible to others, who may use this information for better or worse. This responsibility is heightened in international practice theory with its ambition of locating global questions in particular practical accounts.

Back in the present context, recording and writing about the empty chairs continued outside the field as I scribbled down notes and ideas on post-its, in (other) notebooks, on the backs of shopping receipts and other pieces of scrap paper. I wrote down references to other texts, examples of empty chairing that I have seen or heard of, and ideas for articles developing arguments linked to it (one of them being this one). Rather than knowing what to write from the beginning, these scraps resemble non-linear steps in a process of writing in order to know. In retrospect, they mark the distance travelled between documenting experiences to presenting an account of what they may mean. Borrowing from Dvora Yanow, they chart the distance as writing moves from being author-centric to becoming reader-centric. ⁵⁵

Screen Work

Scrap work often happens in parallel to screen work, which captures two core research practices. First, as a verb and in a procedural sense, it includes screening what others have said about the topic, site or practice we are interested in, and the reading and digesting of extant information. The outcome of this work is the arrangement of the existing literature in such a way that it presents an opening or ‘a gap’ for us to fill. Second, and in a more descriptive sense, the screen work stage includes those hours spent working in front of laptop, computer and mobile-phone screens. While these devices have been central to academic work for decades, their importance has grown in recent years (for example, many journals are no longer published in print form), and to unknown levels during the Covid-19 pandemic, during which ‘scopic media’ and the ‘screen worlds’ have become main research and working sites. ⁵⁶

In the literature on qualitative research, scrap and screen work are often described as ‘desk work’ that next to ‘legwork’ and ‘fieldwork’ rounds off the research cycle. ⁵⁷ Distinguishing these types of work is a heuristic, ‘artificial, and, in many ways, impossible’, ⁵⁸ but useful for the present purpose of foregrounding the hidden work that went into capturing empty chairing. Surely, screen work does not necessarily – or even primarily – happen in the (office) armchair, but often happens ‘accidentally’ or ‘on the go’ during mundane moments of pondering, waiting or ‘hanging out’. ⁵⁹ There is also no clear temporality of screen work, neither in relation to a precise moment when it is done (academia is not a 9-5 job), nor in relation to temporal sequences (i.e. screen work not necessarily happen before or after site work).

In the example of empty chairing, screen work allowed me to retrospectively contextualise my observations. I re-read my notes, re-read methodological literature, and engaged in email conversations about the experiment. One email thread stayed active in my inbox for almost a year, constantly reminding me to (re)engage. This work presents the interpretive backbone, a sort of academic ‘dwelling’ on deciding which questions to unpack and how. On the one hand, screen work influenced how I have since thought about paper printouts on empty chairs, and how I tried to focus on the mundanest of things in observations of other diplomatic meetings. On the other hand, it was during screen-work that the more abstract theorising started: the distance from the field allowed me to ‘zoom out’. I could now think on from the associations made by my colleague or voices in the literature that empty chairing was a way to show absences, turn monologues into false dialogues, or even shame absent parties; and begin to relate these ideas to IR debates on power – for example, who has the power to invite diplomats to a meeting – hierarchy - who is (not) able to show up – or change – (how) does empty chairing work when meetings are held virtually? A full development of the theorising process needs to happen elsewhere. ⁶⁰ For now, foregrounding screen work shows how prior knowledges and immersion into academic literatures and communities influences the capture of practice at the early, embodied stages of theory-making.

Seminar Work

Finally, tacit (academic) knowledges about observable practices are shared and made at academic conferences and during university seminars. While the former have long been discussed as sites of knowledge production, little formal appreciation exists for the latter. Understood primarily as pedagogical meetings, seminar work usually only shows itself in acknowledgement sections. ⁶¹ While seminars are informally well recognised as ludic moments of testing ideas, collegial moments of collaboration, or careerist moments of professional facework, they are seldomly considered for their epistemic role.

This stands in contrast to the experiences I have had while working on this article. The two times I presented earlier drafts of this article, there were structured 5-point-improvement-plans from experienced professors, comments to tailor the manuscript around a particular concept or towards the audience of a specific journal, and empathetic encouragement to dig deeper. Seminar work, in this sense, includes those moments when the researcher engages with her own field and the critique and creativity of those in it. It has the ability to turn reflexivity into a shared practice, a sort of collegial co-reflexivity. It is a powerful abductive tool, as it works both retrospectively, opening our eyes to something others feel we may have missed; or preparatory, sharpening our look for what is yet to be seen. The epistemic importance of often serendipitous interactions stood out very clearly the second time I presented. This is not the kind of paper I normally read, a colleague I don’t normally interact with remarked,

it made me think of a short story by Borges on a boy with the perfect memory that makes him focus on all the wrong things. I think the same is happening to you. The point in the story is that to be able to interact and understand, you need to be able to prioritize. . .In our language that maybe means that we need to approach reality with theory. The chair example is very interesting – you manage to focus on the right variable, but you read it wrong. . .Maybe you can ask what level of theory would allow you to read it correctly? (Seminar notes, November 2019).

After the seminar, I Googled and found Borges’ story Funes the Memorious. ⁶² It tells the faith of Ireneo Funes, an Uruguayan man who suffered a head injury after falling off a horse. Before the accident, Funes had been ‘what all humans are: blind: deaf, addlebrained, absent-minded’, he had ‘looked without seeing, listened without hearing, forgetting almost everything’. ⁶³ But when he woke up, both his perception and his memory were infallible. He knew the patterns of the clouds on any particular day by heart, and learned English, French, Portuguese and Latin without effort. But Funes, Borges concludes, ‘was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions. In the teeming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence’. ⁶⁴

In many ways, Funes’ post-accident abilities describe what practice theorists initially aim for: capturing the richness of mundanity, patterns, and processes. But they also want to think on from this: ‘forget differences, generalize, make abstractions’. What Borges calls ‘thinking’ is the abstract part of practice-theorising, the process of ‘climbing the ladder of abstraction’, ‘zooming out’, or ‘tracing practices’ from ‘contextual specificity’ to ‘analytical generality’. ⁶⁵ My concern here is somewhat prior and focuses on the embodied parts of theorising. Rather than moving up the ladder just yet, seminar work helped me to ‘look back down’ into the richness of my observations with new re-assurance that the empty chairs represented, as this colleague put it, a ‘right variable’. What he thought was missing, however, was abstract theory to help me see. A more practice-theoretical way to think about this is that I was experiencing the ‘trickiness’ of interpreting tacit knowledge. Rather than turning to abstract theory to be able to ‘prioritize’, it was the embodied knowledge of an insider (to the field) that helped capture empty chairing. This experience further underlines how learning about practice happens across multiple and indeed unforeseeable moments. Highlighting them takes us a long way towards the ambitions of transparency outlined above. There is, however, still some way to go, as all of this work was done from the intersection of particular positionalities.

Three Dimensions of Positionality

In this section, I outline three positionalities that have played into capturing the practice of empty chairing. I call them practical, epistemic, and professional positionality. Recognising the researcher and her positionality is a well-established argument in most practice theoretical work. ⁶⁶ It recognises the ‘inescapable perspectivism’ of interpretation and realises that there is no ‘view from nowhere’. Patrick Jackson calls this position ‘mind-world monism’ suggesting that our ‘experience of the world is inescapably mediated by the conceptual and linguistic apparatus that we bring to bear when producing knowledge of the world’. ⁶⁷ What the experiences described above add to this understanding is that positionality extends beyond the ‘mind’ in mind-world monism and highlight how the IR practice theorist needs to ‘be both’: ⁶⁸ observant in the field of practice and participating in the field of theorising. The latter, arguably, is what sets her apart from others on site, and the practice of research work from just ‘being there’. Importantly, thinking about positionality in this way allows us to increase transparency, not do away with interpretive partialities.

Practical Positionality

Practical positionality refers to how the researcher enters, moves around, and is perceived in a site. It characterises her quality of immersion and is often discussed in relation to questions of ‘access’, ‘personal characteristics’, and ‘rapport’. ⁶⁹ Reflecting the above argument that IR discussions tend to treat the minutia of situatedness as ‘obvious, small fry, or beneath their dignity’, ⁷⁰ such questions are often only told in prefaces or methodological appendices thus literally moved to the margins of the text. While such writing practices may reflect the politics of the field of IR more than the convictions of any single researcher, ⁷¹ challenging them brings the researcher back in and shows how personal characteristics or socio-economic traits influence not only the practice but also the outcome of empirical research. In the appendix to Peaceland, an acclaimed study on the everyday practices of peace intervention, Severine Autesserre for example ‘confesses’ that ‘the fact that my husband accompanied me throughout most of my fieldwork helped me to overcome hurdles I faced when investigating male-only environments’. ⁷²

Practical positionality centres on the ‘I’ in doing research and considers how the ‘I’ is implicated in what can(not) be seen, heard, asked, or experienced. ⁷³ A recent example of such a discussion in IR is Mia Halme-Tuomisaari’s study of being an intern at the UN. ⁷⁴ Halme-Tuomisaari develops the concept of ‘tactical subjectivity’ and describes how she uses prejudicial ideas about (her) outward appearance as an invisible methodological tactic. A description of how she ‘lingers’ after a meeting of the UN Human Rights Council exemplifies this point:

It is usually best . . . (to) allow people to slot me into a commonly assigned category: an intern who is probably a PhD candidate. I usually mention my actual scholarly status in passing, yet in continued interaction I embrace the assigned categorisation, pairing it up with a performance of a distinct, exaggerated habitus: ‘blondeness’. With this I refer not to the literal state of having blonde hair – which, ironically, I have – but to the figurative elements commonly associated with ‘blondeness’: uninformed naivety, somewhat childlike dependence, non-threatening benevolence. ⁷⁵

Some of the same dynamics were at play in our fieldwork experiment, both in relation to how ‘I’ was engaging with the (field)site and the scholarly community I was reporting back to. On site, my ‘I’ was embarrassed about a sweaty face, put under pressure to ‘do magic’ and actively tried to hide my ‘positionless-ness’ by sitting in the unassigned back row. At the same time, my ‘I’ was a privileged Western researcher that could easily blend it at a diplomatic meeting. In interactions with this particular diplomatic field and before and after, others, my ‘I’ – a young, white, junior, female, blond, and professionally relative ‘nobody’– was influenced by the tools and procedures of academic knowledge production (emails, meetings, seminars) and relations to others in this field (generally more senior colleagues). While discussing practical positionalities has by now become a virtual must for reflexive IR analyses, the story about the experiment shows how they are continuously implicated in shaping a line of sight that influences both how research is done and what it makes known. If I had known about empty chairing before walking into the ballroom, I may have disregarded it as self-evident in my fieldnotes; if I had been involved in organising the event, I may have put the paper print-outs there myself; and if I had been in a more senior academic position I may have not been thrown by the categorisation of ‘failure’.

Epistemic Positionality

But to account for the capture of practice, we need to think about more than the ‘insertion of the ‘I’ into a fieldwork story’. ⁷⁶ In addition to practical characteristics, IR practice theorist will exhibit and draw on a particular set of epistemic characteristics, generally the outcome of a political (science) education and exposure to different theoretical and conceptual debates on how to approach ‘the international’. As discussed in a recent piece on ‘Who practices practice theory’, such characteristics may also grow out of experiences of having been an IR practitioner oneself. ⁷⁷ Highlighting epistemic positionality is particularly important in the context of international studies, as it can trace abstract arguments of ‘Wester-centrism’, intellectual bias, or nationalistic points of view down ‘to the ground’. In a discipline that has struggled for decades with becoming ‘global’, looking at the global status of its theorists’ epistemics presents an important normative aspect of that struggle. ⁷⁸

Recognising epistemic positionality means recognising how our interpretations are influenced by the ‘sensitizing frames’ we look through. As practical positionality, epistemic positionality is mobile and emerging. Given practice theory’s understanding of ‘theory’ outlined above, we have to accept that no practice lens arrives in the field ready-made. Instead, it is cut in the process of engaging with it, and is sharpened, polished and re-focused as the theorists moves through her work. The first installation of the lens often happens during screen or seminar work, when we read papers or serendipitously get inspired. Ideally, it then zooms wide open or further in during site work, only to be recalibrated again during scrap and seminar work. Epistemic positionality highlights how trying to ‘capture’ practice is always ‘mediated by the researcher reporting it’. ⁷⁹

The point of the experiment – the moment when I learn about empty chairing – is a good example of the force of epistemic positionality. Once made known, the practice cannot be unknown (or unseen), but it had to be learned in order to be captured. Making tacit knowledges explicit is what builds our epistemic positionalities over time and may shift depending on the community of practice we belong to. Recognising and disclosing them adds transparency to the work we do. It shows how working with the approach is itself a ‘practice’ that is shaped by the contexts of its enactment and can be performed with more or less competence. As part of the latter, we should also acknowledge the researcher’s broader (life) experiences and standing in the (professional) environments in which she does her work.

Professional Positionality

Professional positionality extends practical and epistemic perspectivism into the circumstances and life histories of the researcher. C.W. Mills, for instance, saw the latter as a crucial source of the ‘sociological imagination’. ‘Scholarship is a choice of how to live as well as a choice of career’, he explains, and encourages us to ‘learn to use your life experience in your intellectual work: continually to examine and interpret it’. ⁸⁰ Mills’ suggestion for how to do this is to ‘keep up a file’, which again highlights the importance of how practice is written. Such files allow us not only to recall what we observed, but also where it is that we observe things from.

In the experiment, professional positionality influenced my moves in at least two ways. First, in how I first entered the ballroom. Tacitly using the privilege of having been to many international conferences, I mechanically pulled the conference badge over my head, chit-chatted in the foyer, and avoided looking awkward by getting a cup of coffee. Second, and paradoxically, it came through in how I then tried to ‘box off’ this knowing-how-to-act when I worked myself through the task of providing another ‘pair of eyes’. I felt caught when the event co-organiser knew that I was there to do research, and was self-conscious about my copious note-taking. A few months after the day in the ballroom, one colleague commented on a section of an early draft of this article where I described how I felt lost on the site by asking whether

putting it this way does not risk dismissing all of your prior life experience and tries to portray the researcher-observer as a blank page. Sure, you knew very little about the topic of the conference, but you had plenty of prior knowledge of how conferences tend to work (Seminar notes, October 2019).

What the untangling of the observation experiment shows is that being ‘on site’ is far from the only moment capturing practice. Reflecting in detail on the four (heuristic) moments of site, scrap, screen and seminar work illustrates that capturing a practice does not proceed in neat, inductive steps, but by abductively moving back and forth between research sites and the armchair, observation and interpretation, the application of methods and the norms of the academic field. Reflecting, moreover, on the practical, epistemic and professional positionalities that influence these movements shows how capturing practice is not an individual achievement but made in the entanglements of one researcher’s interpretations and those of others. Unpacking the implications of this discussion is the focus of the next, and final section.

At Work with Practice Theory: Moving between Places, Procedures, and Politics

Over the past two decades, the IR practice turn has developed into a robust research programme that has newly unpacked numerous substantive research themes including (in)security, political integration, and intervention. ⁸¹ Practice theorists have invited us to think about the international as it is performed in practices of ‘pen-holding’, ‘shaming’, or ‘speaking down to ‘locals’’; and have theorised how such doings (re)produce hierarchies, perpetuate international tensions, or achieve the opposite of their intended outcomes. Given the entanglement of theory and practice in practice theory, these studies are characterised by extensive empirical work and generally include detailed discussions that describe fieldwork, ‘confess’ limitations, or explain the connection between theoretical concepts and choice of methods - if only in prefaces or appendices. What often remains hidden, however, is the work that happens ‘betwixt and between’, the ‘tricky’ work of first capturing or framing practice.

Introducing a vocabulary to account for this work has been the focus of the preceding sections. Such accountability is especially important for practice research as the ‘theories’ it offers can – and by self-understanding should – not be divorceable form the encounters with the world(s) that make them. But that world is encountered differently and can be known in multiple ways. One way of charting this multiplicity is to think along the heuristics outlined above. They help us unpack why it is that we come to focus on some practices rather than others; develop nuanced accounts of practice in one substantive area of IR (for example diplomatic studies) rather than others; and consider how the work we do on international practices is shaped by academic trends, the politics of writing and publishing, and questions of professional privilege and prestige just as much as by what practitioners of international relations do.

In times of post-truth and populist attacks on science, they help us to be more transparent and offer our readers, our students, and our critics ways of assessing the credibility and trustworthiness of our work. While accounting for our research process is well advanced on the theoretical level in the IR practice turn– a mature debate exists on how and with the help of which thinkers we can theorise the international via its practices – the debate has been less comprehensive on how we first come to find those aspects that we then want to abstract from. Often, references to ‘fieldwork’ or ‘having been there’ dwell in our final texts as legitimations for how practices became known. Yet, reverting to this rhetoric is not good enough if we take practice theorists claims of symmetry and indexicality seriously. Reports of what we observe are incomplete without reflections on how we observe it, from where, when and with(out) whom. These questions point to what we may collectively call ‘political positionality’, which underlies and weaves itself through the dimensions and moments of work discussed above.

‘Political’ can mean one of two things here. Its first meaning is straightforward and refers to the substantive focus of our work. We generally call our work political (science) when it is about institutions of power or governance and their relations. Above, this has happened (implicitly) by visiting a diplomatic meeting to learn about international relations, and then going on to think about the chair as an object that may do political work – in contrast to looking at it through the lens of say a logistician to whom chairs may primarily mean as arrangeable objects. This meaning of political is still powerful in the IR practice turn, and IR’s most successful practice theorists have focused on sites of traditional ‘high politics’ such as the UN Security Council or the Council of the EU. In addition to shifting the research focus away from the content of the work done in such sites (i.e. treaty negotiations) to the ordinary doings that make them (i.e. putting track changes in word-documents) the next big shift of the IR practice turn may be to so far overlook agents or altogether unfamiliar sites.

The second meaning of political is more ‘hidden’ and refers to the role of politics not as a referent object but a constitutive dynamic of our work. It underlines how ‘the process itself is political’ insofar as it locates the researcher within networks of power. ⁸² When interested in theorising the politics of practice, we also have to ask: Where is the practice theorist in practice theory? As argued above, the aim of doing this is neither to romanticise what we do nor to ‘confess’ positionality as an unfortunate by-product. The aim is to produce transparent and ‘open knowledge’ that may inspire and teach, in contrast to ‘secretive knowledge’ that excludes and hides. ⁸³

Approaching the experiment in this way, we see how the research was from the beginning fraught with questions of position, politics, and power. The things that remained unspoken between me and my colleagues – how to do magic and what exactly to look for – exemplify this. Based on implicit assumptions and previous exposure to what happens at a diplomatic meeting, how to behave, and what to pay attention to, the idea was for me to walk into the room as a neutral observer, a sort of mechanical measuring instrument. Yet, my ‘measurements’ relied on my singular positionality formed at the intersection of prior knowledges, epistemic expectations, and locations in institutional hierarchies. Measuring, moreover, did not stop when I left the ballroom, but continued across other sites and moments in emails, seminars, and sidewalk bars. Tracing the latter clearly shows how my (lucky) position of working at a research-heavy institution and being surrounded by colleagues who push for theoretical and methodological innovation enabled me to keep asking methodological questions. It was my environment that turned a supposed ‘failure’ into a conversation about intellectual craft. This way, it actually did add what my colleague called a ‘reflexive loop through an additional observer’ – just not a loop that was focused on the substantive- but on our own field of practice. However, the experiences I relayed also showed how much at risk such conversations are of being side-lined or shut down – recall the solution to next time ‘tell observers what to look for’. In this context, it is encouraging to see that discussions of ‘failure’ and researcher ‘visibility’ are becoming more acceptable in IR. This should be especially interesting for practice theorists, who readily admit that ‘slippage’ or ‘incompetent’ behaviour is often central in working out the meaning and political implications of practice. ⁸⁴

Conclusion

How does one ‘capture’ an international practice? In this article, I have used the story of a ‘failed’ fieldwork experiment to unpack this question. The experiment, a term that here stood for epistemic curiosity to try out still marginal methods in IR, centred on the events of one spring day in 2019 when I was invited to provide another set of eyes at a meeting of international diplomats. Tracing my own steps through the day and its aftermath, I argued that producing knowledge about international practices is inseparable from the procedures, norms, and tacit expectations of IR (practice)scholarship itself. This argument developed out of the symmetry claim that theorising and doing research is itself bound by the rules of social practice; and the indexicality claim that practices are ambiguous and open-ended, which links their performance to questions of competence and power.

I illustrated this argument by tracing how I came to know about the practice of empty chairing someone at a conference. I discussed how my direct observations from initial work on site became meaningful via various moments of scrap, screen, and seminar work. While practice theorists for the time being mainly talk about fieldwork to refer to what it is they do when they leave their ‘armchair’, I focused on these additional dimensions to emphasise the work that is hiding beyond such methodological metaphors. These dimensions lay out what has been called the ‘trickiness’ of studying practice, the work that is involved in moving from observing bodies move or artefacts handled to capturing what such movement and handling might mean, and how it may be implicated in shaping international relations. In addition to these often messy steps, I found that doing this work is also intimately linked to the researcher’s epistemic, practical, professional, and political positionalities. Foregrounding the latter is crucial for an approach that sees theories as emergent from encounters between researcher and researched, as our positionalities not only influence what we can observe but are incomplete without reflections on how we observe it, from where, when and with(out) whom. Adding reflections of these two heuristics into our analyses will advance the practice turn in three ways: first, pedagogically, in transferring a more accurate impressions of what the approach involves to our students; second, normatively, in accounting for where our arguments come from; and third, epistemically, by enabling reflection on what we may have missed for not (yet) being able to see practices, and, equally important, to avoid only seeing what we are looking for.

As a new dose of reflexivity, the methodological vocabulary introduced in this article helps us show how ‘capturing’ practice – with all its tacit knowledges, bodily movements, and material mediation – is a social practice in its own right. A more pessimistic take on this will highlight the limiting effects of institutional hierarchies, publication norms, and politicised access to professional resources and sites. A more optimistic take will highlight the inspiring force of collegial creativity, collaboration, and serendipitous encounters. More research is required on both. In the meantime and staying true to both the symmetry and indexicality claim, it is an illusion to think that knowledge about something as intricate as a single international practice – or as complex as the practices of international relations – can be made and contained in a single moment, site, or scholar’s mind. Fruitful research on international practices will therefore always allow for experimentation, collaboration, and - last but not least – for failure.